Новости за 19.11.2015

Sadik Kukic came to the United States from Bosnia in 1993. At that time Bosnia was consumed by war: Following the break-up of Yugoslavia, territorial disputes had given rise to armed conflict, which eventually led to the attempted genocide of Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats. Kukic, a Bosniak Muslim, had spent five months in two different Serbian concentration camps when his opportunity to escape arrived. By a stroke of luck, Kukic and a few family members managed to attain refugee status, and made their way to St. Читать дальше...

The original 1953 paperback.

When The Price of Salt was first published in paperback in 1953, Patricia Highsmith was flooded with thousands of letters from readers. The letters came addressed to the author “Claire Morgan,” the pseudonym Highsmith had used for the book, for fear of being labelled what she later called a “lesbian-book writer.” They arrived in the hundreds from male and female readers alike, thanking Highsmith for writing a book that finally showed a same-sex relationship that didn’t end in tragedy. Читать дальше...

Ben Carson’s appeal to voters in the Republican presidential primary is widely believed to be based on his status as a political outsider. Of course, being an outsider means you don’t have a lot of inside info on political stuff, like how to win wars, or even who to ask for help. This has been a tough lesson for Carson over the last five days. Let’s review:

Mahatma Gandhi as a law student, 1887Henry Guttmann / Getty

Gandhi was 24 years old when he arrived in Natal, South Africa in May 1893, the month in which white settlers celebrated the 50th anniversary of Natal’s annexation by the British Crown. Gandhi was called to the Bar in June 1891 and was struggling to establish a law practice in Bombay when the firm of Dada Abdulla & Co., offered him a year-long contract to assist in a legal matter on the southern tip of Africa. Gandhi took up the offer consisting of a first class passage to Natal... Читать дальше...

Writers have been grumbling about the ideological perils of war photography nearly as long as photographers have ventured into conflict zones, but in the years since Susan Sontag’s 1977 treatise On Photography, which took leery scrutiny of photography to new heights, it’s become something of a pastime for critics. The result has been what the writer Susie Linfield has described as “a tsunami of too-easy scorn.”

If only he’d written it all down: “One night at their campfire, accompanied by whisky ablutions,” Miguel A., a native Zuni finally told the anthropologist everything: 

The deadly attacks in Paris last week, followed by the second Democratic primary debate over the weekend, reignited a Republican obsession, unique to the Obama era, with the claim that U.S. leaders can’t defeat jihadi terrorism unless they identify the perpetrators with highly prescriptive language.