Culture
Every spring since 2001, a group of earnest, impassioned students has gathered near Sather Gate, cordoning part of it off with emergency tape. Some of them don faux uniforms and brandish mock M-16s; others wear keffiyehs and traditional Arab robes. Then the actors set up a military checkpoint, a simulacrum of the hundreds of real checkpoints that pepper the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The “soldiers” allow “Israeli settlers... Learn more »
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« The Eunuch Admiral
I first heard the Admiral’s name spoken by a corrupt police inspector in 1982. He was a local potentate in Sumatra, the Indonesian island that cuts like a scimitar through the eastern Indian Ocean, separating it from the Strait of Malacca. Sumatra is a strange, unsettling place, more than 180,000 square miles of malarial swamp and jungle broken by 35 active volcanoes. On the unbearably humid coast, clothes and bedsheets are never dry;... Learn more »
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« The Ecology of Conflict
It is a counterintuitive—and in many ways, deeply disturbing—development, but something good has come out of the reign of terror by Somali pirates: fish. Tuna, wahoo, and marlin, to be precise—the big pelagic fish that are in high demand in the world’s upscale markets and restaurants.
These species have been in steep decline, a consequence of overfishing by the huge trawl, long-line, and drift-net boats of the international... Learn more »
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