Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The play, Clybourne Park, has become a cultural fixture during the Obama presidency. It suggests that, when it comes to race in America, not much has changed over the past half-century. "It is the audacity of rage, not hope"
US reaches tipping point in transition from "mostly white baby boomer culture to globalised multi-ethnic country". What does it mean? Will older Americans balk at paying for a generation who look less like themselves?
Revolt against Assad is also being fought through satire and cultural resistance. River running through Damascus was dyed red. Sound systems get hidden in ministries and municipal buildings to play revolutionary songs
Hong Kong is in flux once more. "Now a Chinese special administrative region, it is being remade yet again under diamond pressure. And increasingly this city of over seven million inhabitants floats on a growing sense of unease"
Married to the 'Ndrangheta. "Ms Cacciola was forced into a loveless marriage at the age of 16, with a man who almost immediately disappeared into the solitary confinement wing of a prison. From then on, she was rarely allowed out"
Spain is in crisis. One the young are ill-prepared for. Why? "There was a narrative that no adult challenged and which we therefore took for granted: That every generation has a better life than the previous one." Time for a rethink
First up: European nations used to be homogenous but have become plural because of mass immigration. Er, no. To believe this requires "historical amnesia and a highly selective standard for defining what it is to be plural"
Hemingway's old paper, the Toronto Star, has launched a terrific new project to republish his columns. In this piece, from 1923, Hemingway describes the first bullfights he saw – an experience he was to revisit in his first novel
Curtis introduces 40-minute film about how Norman Mailer stood for mayor of New York in 1969. "It captures a phenomenon that has come to dominate (and possibly strangle) western metropolitan society today – the rise of the hipster"
Further comment on Eltahawy's angry and provocative broadside against Arab men. Her reasonable outrage was a good start, but any further treatment should pay more attention to the nuance and complexity the subject deserves
American aid worker approaches end of two-year stint in Haiti, wonders: What good did I do? All the imported equipment is broken. Society continues as it did before. Nobody says thank you. On the contrary, they hate us
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, sex is not confined to the bedroom, it's deeply political. And the country's fundamentalist clerics aren't above considering juridical aspects of the most bizarre sexual imaginings
