Category: Current Events

September 21, 2010

"Fried chicken and French fries to snack. Soccer after school. Hip hop music. Nike threads. Family obligations. Difference has rarely been so strikingly familiar"

Justin Gest begins his book Apart: Alienated and Engaged Muslims in the West with a description of the young man portrayed on the cover of the book (see above). Zak lives on London’s East End in an unfinished project. Like...

September 14, 2010

The Changing Face of the Taliban

In a recent issue of the London Review of Books , Jonathan Steele examines the current situation in Afghanistan and reviews two recent CUP books, My Life with the Taliban, the autobiography of former Taliban leader Abdul Salam Zaeef, and...

September 3, 2010

Rashid Khalidi and Menachem Klein on the Middle East Peace Process

“Moreover, as an Israeli I do not see my government building public trust in the peace talks or in the Palestinian partner, nor expressing serious desire to achieve peace and building public enthusiasm for it.”—Menachem Klein Room for Debate, an...

August 27, 2010

India's Forced Labor — Siddharth Kara

Siddharth Kara, author of Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, continues his extraordinary series on CNN.com with a look at forced labor in India. Kara has been traveling in South Asia researching bonded labor and in his latest...

August 17, 2010

Jonathan Soffer on Ed Koch's Effort to Fight Corruption

Yesterday’s New York Times blog, the City Room, quoted Jonathan Soffer, author of the forthcoming Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City, about Koch’s newly established organization New York Uprising. The group is dedicated to “to shame politicians...

August 16, 2010

Charli Carpenter on WikiLeaks

In a recent Foreign Policy article on the recent release by WikiLeaks of documents pertaining to the U.S. war in Afghanistan , Charli Carpenter, author of Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond,...

August 12, 2010

Richard Bulliet on the Mosque at Ground Zero

An article from the new web site, Capital, recently interviewed Richard Bulliet, author of The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, about the proposed Mosque at Ground Zero. Bulliet admits that when he first heard about the project he thought it might...

August 9, 2010

Christopher Davidson on Blackberry Censorship in the UAE

Christopher Davidson, whose book Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success was just reviewed in the New York Review of Books, recently contributed to the Index on Censorship on the UAE’s recent decision to ban Blackberry use. Davidson argues that the UAE’s...

August 2, 2010

Abdul Salam Zaeef Removed from U.N. Sanctions List

Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan and author of the autobiography My Life with the Taliban, was one of five members of the Taliban recently removed from the United Nations Security Council’s sanctions list. According to an...

July 30, 2010

Siddharth Kara on Human Trafficking in India

Siddharth Kara, the author of Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, continues his CNN series on human trafficking with an interview with Becky Anderson. In the interview Kara discusses human trafficking in India and shows pictures of its...

July 29, 2010

Peter Maguire on Cambodia's Troubled Tribunal

In yesterday’s New York Times, Peter Maguire, author of Facing Death in Cambodia, examines the upcoming war crimes trials of four former Khmer Rouge political leaders. Maguire argues that given that these figures only gave orders and did not carry...

July 27, 2010

Peter Sloterdijk and David Barash Look Back on Anger

In a recent issue of The Chronicle Review, three commentators explored the phenomenon of rage which seems to be a more dominant characteristic of American society than ever before. In his article Look Ahead in Anger: Hyperbolic rhetoric threatens to...