Life in Timbuktu
Once a hub of Arab-African trade, Timbuktu is now a city on the edge—with the desert encroaching, water supplies disappearing, and rebel fighters threatening new attacks.
Confessional Writing Is Not Self-indulgent
The author of The Empathy Exams on the power of personal stories.
Trafficked Into Slavery on Thai Trawlers to Catch Food for Prawns
An investigation of the Thai fishing industry, which has been built on enslaving migrant workers:
The price captains pay for these men is a extremely low even by historical standards. According to the anti-trafficking activist Kevin Bales, slaves cost 95% less than they did at the height of the 19th-century slave trade – meaning that they are not regarded as investments for important cash crops such as cotton or sugar, as they were historically, but as disposable commodities.
For the migrants who believed Thailand would bring them opportunity, the reality of being sent out to sea is devastating.
“They told me I was going to work in a pineapple factory,” recalls Kyaw, a broad-shouldered 21-year-old from rural Burma. “But when I saw the boats, I realised I’d been sold … I was so depressed, I wanted to die.”
All Together Now
The Spice Girls were the biggest, brashest girlie group ever to have hit the British mainstream. Kathy Acker was an avant-garde American writer and academic. They met up in 1997 to swap notes—on boys, girls, politics.
They are here to rehearse for an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Not only is this their first live TV performance, it’s also the first time they’ll be playing with what Mel C calls a ‘real band’. If the Girls are to have any longevity in the music industry, they will have to break into the American market; and for this they will need the American media. Both the Girls and their record company believe that their appearance here tonight might do the trick. There is a refusal among America’s music critics to take the Spice Girls seriously. The Rolling Stone review of Spice, their first album, refers to them as ‘attractive young things . . . brought together by a manager with a marketing concept’. The main complaint, or explanation for disregard, is that they are a ‘manufactured band’. What can this mean in a society of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and En Vogue?
The Obliteration of a Person
Marion Coutts recalls the last months of her husband, art critic Tom Lubbock, after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Excerpted from Coutt’s memoir The Iceberg:
Fast forward to February. The future has arrived early. Tom has a severe fit in the small hours of the morning. He had gone away by himself to get some writing done in a house by the sea and was due home today. It is evening, he is back with us, lying down quietly upstairs. He can talk after a fashion, read a little but he can’t write. He is estranged from himself.
Spring. There is going to be destruction: the obliteration of a person, his intellect, his experience and his agency. I am to watch it. This is my part. It is now March. In one week, Tom will have another scan. This is the one to fear. There have not been so many fits, but outside them complexity is multiplying and thousands of lesser confusions also occur. Words slip out, switches are stumbled over and substitutions made.
Inside Europe’s Last Dictatorship
The crisis in neighbouring Ukraine has rattled Alexander Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime. But with the opposition in retreat and the media silenced, can Belarus escape his grip?
In the pantheon of great dictators, Lukashenko is a curiosity. The man known as ‘Batka’ (father of the nation) leads the country’s absurd TV news night after night, whether he is inspecting a tractor, ticking off the cabinet, arriving in Kazakhstan, or all three.
Before last month’s world championships of his beloved ice hockey – the biggest sporting event Belarus has ever held – the president was taking no chances. Concerned about possible shows of dissent, dozens of activists were rounded up and sent to jail.
What It’s Like To Be Four Months Pregnant and Embedded in Afghanistan
Four months pregnant, a journalist joined US forces in Afghanistan as an embedded correspondent. This is her story:
On a muggy August afternoon, I dragged myself and my flu to an infectious-disease doctor. I asked him if he could give me some antibiotics for Afghanistan that were safe to take when you’re pregnant. His eyes leapt up from his notes.
“How far along are you?”
“Three months and a bit.”
I stared at a James Nachtwey photograph on his wall as he regaled me with stories about his war-photographer patients, all of whom were men. Clearly, I posed a different equation.
“Are you sure you will be able to run?” he said. “Because you’re going to need to run, and I have to advise you not to go in your condition.”
The Difference Between Being ‘Trusted’ and ‘Trustworthy’
Russell Brand on Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper and the dismal state of today’s news industry:
Rupert Murdoch, an animatronic al-Qaida recruitment poster, in his private letter to Sun staff, after the News of the World was briefly closed for a makeover (not through remorse, or shame, no, because they couldn’t sell advertising space and because he wanted to launch the Sun on Sunday anyway because it’s cheaper to run one title than two – some guys get all the luck) referred consistently to his pride in the Sun as “a trusted news source”. Trusted is the word he used, not trustworthy. We know the Sun is not trustworthy and so does he. He uses the word “trusted” deliberately. Hitler was trusted, it transpired he was not trustworthy. He also said of the arrested journalists, “everyone is innocent until proven guilty”. Well, yes, that is the law of our country, not however a nicety often afforded to the victims of his titles, and here I refer not only to hacking but the vituperative portrayal of weak and vulnerable members of our society, relentlessly attacked by Murdoch’s ink jackals. Immigrants, folk with non-straight sexual identities, anyone in fact living in the margins of the Sun’s cleansed utopia.
Getting Stuffed: A Tale of Love and Taxidermy
The writer visits a taxidermy shop to purchase a Valentines’s Day gift. This essay will be included in David Sedaris’s new book, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls:
“The taxidermist and I discussed the owls, and when my eyes cut to a glass-doored cabinet with several weather-beaten skulls inside it, he asked if I was a doctor.
“‘Me?’ For some reason I looked at my hands. ‘Oh, goodness no.’
“‘Then your interest in those skulls is non-professional?’
“‘Exactly.’
“The taxidermist’s eyes brightened, and he led me to a human skeleton half hidden in the back of the room. ‘Who do you think this was?’ he asked.
“Being a layman, all I had to go by was the height – between four and a half and five feet tall. ‘Is it an adolescent?'”
Bryan Saunders: Portrait Of The Artist On Crystal Meth
A writer visits the home of Bryan Saunders, an artist known for his self-portraits created under the influence of a variety of drugs:
“We turn to the next one. ‘Whoa,’ I say. This one could not be less Xanax-like. The drawing is spindly and paranoid, and the page is patterned with real-life bullet holes. They pepper Bryan’s stomach and neck. I ask Bryan how they got there and he explains that he used a gun borrowed from a friend. He propped up the page from the sketchbook and repeatedly shot it. ‘I remember bouncing into the walls like a fly going bong, bong, bong,’ he says. The drug that elicited this reaction was called Geodon.
“‘Geodon?’ I say.
“Bryan Googles it. ‘It’s for symptoms of schizophrenia,’ he reads, ‘so it’s an anti-psychotic agent, I guess.’
“‘Did you get it from somebody with schizophrenia?’ I ask.
“‘No, I got it from a doctor,’ Bryan says. And this is when Bryan tells me the other way he acquires many of his drugs. He sometimes visits psychiatrists, tells them about the art project, and asks them for ‘samples of some pain pill or sedative I’ve never tried. I say, ‘Can you write me a prescription for just one so I can do my drawing?’ And I take my book with me and show them my art project. And they always give me some crazy, crazy anti-psychotic pill instead.'”