Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
"I want to challenge the received wisdom about difference, diversity and multiculturalism. I want to question what we mean by diversity and contest the claim that racism and multiculturalism are concepts at opposite ends of a pole"
Son's plea to let his mother go. "By promoting longevity and technologically inhibiting death, we have created a new biological status held by an ever-growing part of the nation, a no-exit state nearly as remote from life as death"
"No one knows how many children are sleeping in manholes, or basements, under bridges, or on top of hot water pipes around Ukraine, but the figure is likely to be in the tens of thousands." Theroux seeks some of them out
Superb short essay in favour of boat-rocking. "Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes." This is where great art comes from. If we believe in liberty, we must celebrate it
Interview with fugitive hacker Christopher Doyon. "Right now we have access to every classified database in the US government. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems. The pimply-faced kid in the basement"
"In the new South Africa that was reborn in the early 1990s, with its freedom hard-won from apartheid, we now have the imminent threat of updated versions of the suppression of freedom of expression that gagged us under apartheid"
Comment on Mona Eltahawy's polemic (linked to below) on the treatment of women in the Arab world. Yes, the problems are real but they need putting in a wider context where wholesale reform is needed. It's not just about gender
A call to arms. "Arab societies hate women. Name me an Arab country, and I'll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend"
Hackers collective Anonymous and the US State Department don't have much in common but they do both proclaim their support for Internet freedom. "Ironically, both may end up hurting the very noble cause that they seek to promote"
In three decades the Almeria region of south-east Spain has been transformed from one of the country's poorest regions to one of the richest. Wealth has been driven by the horticulture industry. And very cheap illegal African labour
"After months of mysterious pain and heavy bleeding after the birth, she had an ultrasound and discovered that her uterus had been removed. 'They just said to me, 'What do you need more children for? You already have two'"
Islamists rising to the top in the Arab world speak of freedom, equality, democratic values. At the same time, they insist Islam is the basis for these freedoms. Does this allow for genuine religious freedom? Evidence suggests not
Image from Wikimedia Commons
"I may not agree with you, but I'll defend to the death my right to tell you to shut up"
