Adam Laats writes: When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) blocked the first draft of an Advanced Placement African American studies course, he insisted he did not want to eliminate Black history, but only to control it. It might seem that his campaign has succeeded: The College Board announced a new watered-down curriculum that transformed resistance… Read More »
Science News reports: Long-distance supply chains, vulnerable to disruptions from wars and disease outbreaks, may have formed millennia before anyone today gasped at gas prices or gawked at empty store shelves. Roughly 3,650 to 3,200 years ago, herders and villagers who mined tin ore fueled long-distance supply chains that transported the metal from Central Asia… Read More »
Robert Draper writes: Newt Gingrich was disdainful. After watching days of House Republicans failing to elect a speaker, Mr. Gingrich, the most famous of all recent G.O.P. House speakers, vented about the hard-right holdouts, among them Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. “There’s no deal you can make with Gaetz,” Mr. Gingrich said in an interview… Read More »
Uilleam Blacker writes: In the 2007 film “Katyn,” directed by Poland’s acclaimed Andrzej Wajda, a young woman in wartime Krakow tries to sell her hair to raise money for a headstone for her brother, who has been murdered and buried in an unmarked grave by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. She finds a buyer… Read More »
Rolling Stone reports: Dženita Mulabdić hugged the ground, the sound of gunfire fast approaching. The pregnant 20-year-old Bosnian woman and her husband, Muhamed, eyed the locked basement door. Their toddler played close by, unaware of the armed men outside. The commandos from Belgrade, wearing black balaclavas, jumped the fence and entered the house in the… Read More »
Shukriya Bradost writes: If I had been killed, would I have had the same impact on the Iranian people as what we have witnessed since the killing in September of the 22-year-old Kurdish woman Jina-Mahsa Amini? Definitely not. The use of heavy military weaponry to crack down on protests in Kurdish cities in Iran, which… Read More »
Rasha Al Aqeedi writes: In 2008, the Iraqi government declared the day of Christmas, Dec. 25, a public holiday. Despite being one of the few Muslim-majority states to acknowledge Christmas, the decision was, in many ways, overdue. Iraq is home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, one that played a key… Read More »
James Risen writes: Elon Musk is on his way to becoming the next Henry Ford. That is not a compliment. In his early entrepreneurial years, Ford was a revolutionary: an innovative genius who transformed the way Americans traveled, worked, and lived. Ford effectively created the modern assembly line, driving down manufacturing costs, raising productivity, and… Read More »
Andrea Wulf writes: In September 1798, one day after their poem collection Lyrical Ballads was published, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth sailed from Yarmouth, on the Norfolk coast, to Hamburg in the far north of the German states. Coleridge had spent the previous few months preparing for what he called ‘my German… Read More »
Seema Chishti writes: Much of the dominance of the Hindu right in India’s politics today can be traced back to the movement to destroy the Babri Masjid [in the northeastern Indian town of Ayodhya] and build a temple for Lord Rama, a key Hindu deity, where it once stood. Many Hindu nationalists maintain that the… Read More »
Daniel Immerwahr writes: Russia’s war in Ukraine has involved many surprises. The largest, however, is that it happened at all. Last year, Russia was at peace and enmeshed in a complex global economy. Would it really sever trade ties – and threaten nuclear war – just to expand its already vast territory? Despite the many… Read More »
Paymon Azmoudeh writes: There are few places in Iran further from Saqqez, in Iranian Kurdistan, where Zhina (aka Mahsa) Amini was born in 1999 and buried on Sept. 17, than Zahedan, 1,200 miles away in Sistan and Balochistan province. Yet, despite living at opposite ends of the country, Iran’s Kurdish and Baloch communities face similar… Read More »
Michael Marder writes: Contemporary events appear in ever-shifting configurations. They seem to be entirely contingent, their amplification on the global scale dependent on how many people are paying attention. The vicissitudes of spotlighting various events are daily, if not hourly: something that was the focus of attention yesterday may be forgotten today. A massacre and… Read More »
Ali Hashem writes: [I]n the span of less than half a century, many Iranians have undergone a seismic shift in attitudes – moving from a tendency toward Islamism under secular rule to a yearning for secularization under theocracy. This shift illustrates what the renowned Iranian scholar Homa Katouzian has dubbed Iran’s “short-term society.” Katouzian likens… Read More »
Chris Murphy writes: For millions of Americans—especially those who don’t live in the high-income urban mega-economies—it feels like life itself is unspooling. This sense of dislocation is what Donald Trump’s politics of grievance seized upon when he launched his campaign for the presidency in 2015. He offered easy scapegoats—immigrants, Muslims, and economic elites—to blame for… Read More »
The Washington Post reports: Growing up in the 1930s, Daniel R. Smith would listen to stories from his father, as young boys often do. He was not supposed to hear these stories — they were meant for his older siblings, not for a child as young as 5 or 6 — but after dinner on… Read More »