Sarajevo
Aleksandar Hemon: In Paris, Zlatan Ibrahimović Learns to Share
In Sarajevo, Bosnia, where I grew up playing a lot of soccer, the slang word mahalaš refers to a cocky player who much prefers feints to passes; who’d rather nutmeg someone than shoot; who deplores defending. All the lost balls and all the teammates ignored while in scoring position are relegated into oblivion by each small masterpiece: dribbling past an entire defense, scoring from an impossible angle, bamboozling a goalie. READ MORE >>
As the international community continues to debate high-minded principles of national sovereignty, Syria continues its downward spiral into unmitigated chaos. The bitter truth is that the longer this situation continues, the deeper the scars will be once the nation has been freed of Bashar Al-Assad. Increasingly, crimes against humanity are being committed by both sides, as the Free Syria Army struggles to incorporate and maintain control over its armed rebel brigades. READ MORE >>
My 18 Year Odyssey on the Trail of Osama bin Laden
I have covered the story of violent jihadism for the past 18 years, and, more than anything else, it has been a slow process of discovery. Looking back, it seems clear to me that, at any given moment in the story, there was always so much we didn’t know. READ MORE >>
Holbrooke
Discoveries
The White Ribbon Sony Pictures Classics Creation Newmarket Films READ MORE >>
Ending Our Age of Suffering
Surging and Awakening
The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 By Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 394 pp., $27.95) I. READ MORE >>
The Deadly Jester
In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Žižek (Verso, 504 pp., $34.95) Violence by Slavoj Žižek (Picador, 272 pp., $14) I. Last year the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj READ MORE >>
Trying war criminals locally.
Four years, 466 hearing days, more than 300 witnesses, and over $200 million after it began in The Hague, Case Number IT-02-54, Prosecutor v. Slobodan Milosevic, was officially declared over on March 14, three days after Milosevic was found dead of an apparent heart attack in his prison cell. There will be no verdict. READ MORE >>
Terror and Television
The speed at which popular culture now dramatizes actual events is extraordinary. I'm not sure whether a movie was made about Kennedy's assassination not long after the event, but it was decades before a film appeared that portrayed Kennedy's murder with real provocative detachment, Oliver Stone's tendentious JFK. Two years later Hollywood finally applied itself big-time to the Holocaust with Schindler's List. There were previous Holocaust films, obviously; but Hollywood gigantism in the treatment of the subject had to await Steven Spielberg. READ MORE >>
