The IMF Makes Class Warriors of Us All
On October 24, 1973, the Egyptian military, under the command of General Hosni Mubarak, and under instructions from President Anwar Sadat, dealt an unprecedented blow to the most powerful regime in the Middle East: Israel. As the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal and established bridgeheads in the Sinai peninsula, it changed the fortunes of a hitherto shaky Egyptian presidency. Until this victory over IDF forces, Sadat had struggled to appear as the legitimate heir to the iconic Gamal Abdel Nasser, but this victory, which wiped out the stain of defeat of 1967, in one stroke turned Sadat from a hesitant, accidental president into the batal al-‘ubur or Hero of the Crossing.This event and this moniker were all the more significant in light of what followed. …
Phyllis Schlafly and Donald Trump: not-so-strange bedfellows
Phyllis Schlafly’s conservative manifesto, A Choice, Not an Echo, has a quote on the cover that is as fresh today as when it was first published in May 1964. Under a picture of the author (in perfectly styled hair and two strings of pearls) a caption promises to tell “the inside story of how American Presidents are chosen.” Comparing GOP leaders to Paris couturiers who “brainwash” unthinking female consumers, she revealed in the introduction that the presidential nominating process had been stolen from the people. Between 1936 and 1960, she wrote, “a few secret kingmakers based in New York selected Republican presidential nominees…and successfully forced their choice on a free country where there are more than 34 million voters.”
As Donald Trump’s unexpected electoral strength potentially leads …
Stanley Milgram, Cinematic Chauvinism, and Psychotherapy: Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter
Shakespeare’s ubiquity makes adaptations of his work uniquely instructive: a critical and staging history of a familiar play creates a backdrop against which to see the vision of a filmmaker at work. …
The End of Europe
The process of European unification is undergoing a deep crisis, certainly the deepest since it started at the beginning of the 1950s. In less than a year, the EU faced two major tests—first the Greek quarrel, then the refugee crisis — that revealed its true face: a mixture of impotence, unwillingness, egoism, arrogance and cynicism. It is not a pretty spectacle. …
