What do you know about Minsk, the capital of Belarus? Or the nation of Georgia? If you know anything, it’s either a oversimplification like ‘danger’ or ‘forested’ or an enticing tagline about wine and prosperity. An entire niche industry helps create identities, sometimes to attract tourists, sometimes, as with Libya, to scrub its image clean.
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Posted inEditor's Pick, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction
Magen David and Me
After facing persecution in the former Soviet Union and a new wave of antisemitism in the United States, Marya Zilberberg decides to put her Jewishness on display.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
Magen David and Me
After facing persecution in the former Soviet Union and a new wave of antisemitism in the United States, Marya Zilberberg decides to put her Jewishness on display.
Posted inArts & Culture, Business & Tech, Nonfiction, Quotes, Travel
The Business of Building a Country’s Brand
A whole sector of the marketing industry shapes stories about nations and cities to shape our opinions about place.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Becoming One of the World’s 65 Million Refugees
Majid Hussain keeps having to run.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Becoming One of the World’s 65 Million Refugees
Majid Hussain keeps having to run.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Is the Internet Changing Time?
“Fragments of the past are for the first time on tap, not stored away in boxes,” writes Laurence Scott.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
On Being Eritrean
In her essay in Pacific Standard, Rahawa Haile writes about identity, the anxiety of origins, and the search for a grounded life in unstable, isolating locales. Born to Eritrean parents, Haile grew up in Miami, Florida, speaking English and Tigrinya in a low land of built of hurricane deposits that felt doomed to rising sea levels. […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Seven Takes on Obama for the Final State of the Union
Stories from Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and more.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
C.J. Chivers’ Particular Brand of War Journalism
The Times hired Chivers at age thirty-four in 1999 to cover war. That was the handshake, he says. A former Marine officer, he might know how to handle himself in a war zone, the paper figured. What the Times could not have known was that Chivers would develop a brand of journalism unique in the world for, among other […]
