In “On the Benghazi Express,” the Arab Spring transports a veteran reporter Marc Cooper back to Egypt and his naive younger self. Great story.
(via Designboom)
“Tin Soldiers” is an installation which depicts the nine armies that were implicated in, or subject to, acts of war in today’s Middle East. The pieces are produced in numbers proportional to those of active troops in 2010. Each of the featured armies are cast from the same mould and hand-painted in the military outfits of Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Turkey. A total of 12,235 soldiers at a scale of 1:200 are arranged in a systematic platform, in a way acting as a multistage exploration of the results of the instrumentalizing of individuals through political and economic agendas.
Cairo, Egypt: Garbage City. Residents known as Zabaleen collect and process huge quantities of the Egyptian capital’s refuse. More info …
"As Americans, we have inherited a stacked deck. We’re in a headlock with our corporate masters and in exchange we’re kept numb by entertainment and assurances that we’re the strongest country on the face of the earth. We serve our corporations and what they want. What these corporations want from Egypt is a territory kept cooperative enough for America to pick clean of its resources."
— Meakin Armstrong, from “Revolution and the American Fever Dream”
"That we often don’t know as much about the people in these countries as we do about their Tweets is a testament to the cutbacks in foreign coverage at many news organizations — and perhaps also to our own desire to escape a war zone that has for so long sapped American energy, resources and patience."
— Frank Rich’s “Wallflowers at the Revolution” op-ed in the New York Times. Good, good read. (via sharedair)
Get the facts about Egypt
Get the background you need on Mubarak and Egypt—from Boutros Boutros-Ghali on Egypt in the Post-Sadat Era to CFR Fellow Steven Cook on Mohamed El Baradei’s chance for reform.
Also check out our ‘must reads’ from this Egyptian politics reading list.
