Arabs on the Beach in Alexandria
A young woman vacating in Alexandria examines Egyptians’ rejection of Arabness and Africanness, and how Bedouins play into the mythologies of otherness in Egypt.
Decriminalization: A Love Story
In a ranging piece funded by the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, journalist Susana Ferreira reports on the decriminalization of drugs in Portugal, where since 2001, addiction has been treated more like an illness than a crime.
Vincent’s Final Days
A look at the last days of Vincent van Gogh. The painter was visiting his brother and sister-in-law in Paris weeks before he died of a self-inflicted gun wound:
“Vincent was thirty-seven now, an old thirty-seven. After his attacks during the last eighteen months, he had given up on many cherished dreams. In particular, he had given up on having the wife and children he had yearned for as a young man. Now he knew with certainty that he was too sick for marriage or for a regular domestic life. With that dream now just a memory, only a few things still mattered to him. He cared about his painting most of all and pursued it with a constant, unwavering, feverish intensity. He cared about the paintings of artists he admired, such as Gauguin and Bernard and, above all, Millet. He cared about literature and reading. He cared about Theo, and now he cared about the infant Vincent Willem. He cared to a degree about his sister Willemina and about his mother. He cared about a few friends, and he cared, in an abstract, sentimental way, about the mass of impoverished workers and miners and peasants. He cared about seduced and abandoned women and about prostitutes in the streets and their children. He thought that men who were not prepared to protect and rescue a woman were unworthy and should be ashamed. He could be charming and kind to small children, and he loved his pipe. He didn’t drink much anymore or go to the brothels. His religious beliefs, which had obsessed him when he was young, had lost their fervor, if they hadn’t evaporated entirely. An elderly couple out walking together or a pretty girl and her young companions in the countryside might produce longing reveries in him, but he knew those reveries were for a world beyond his embrace, except in his painting.”