Widescreen: from [Untitled] by timoshea95. CC/flickr
Through vertical integration and aggressive intellectual property regimes, agribusiness is slowly taking over vast chunks of the world…
Ahead of a constitutional referendum, the hottest tattoo in Istanbul is the signature of Kemal Ataturk…
The stubborn Pashtuns will likely never submit to continuous foreign occupation. Maybe some other Afghan peoples would…
At first, the Three Gorges Dam could handle 10,000-year flood. Then a 1,000-year flood. Now a 100-year flood… [Fr]
Iran thought it had wiped out Jundallah, a Sunni Baloch extremist group. But dual suicide bombings showed that it was very much alive…
To fuel a dull and cynical nationalism, Romanian politicians are creating nearly a million new citizens, who can’t wait to get out of Moldova…
On the eve of independence, Southern Sudan is caught in a simmering tribal war of bloody raids and cattle theft…
The Indian media is full of strident denouncements of Islamist terrorism. When Hindu extremism turns brutal, the media falls silent…
An international trade in carbon offsets will let rich countries fudge their carbon-reduction targets and subsidize construction for huge coal-burning plants…
Brazil sees Africa as a platform for commercial competition with China and for Lula’s post-presidential ambitions…
Every year, forest fires come to Kurdish villages, and every year, the Turkish military claims not to be responsible…
For Ecuador’s indigenous peoples, Rafael Correa’s “21st-century socialism” looks just like 20th-century exploitation…
An opaque one-party state indifferent to its legal apparatus amid an economic free-for-all is fuelling corruption in Vietnam…
The UK is purposelessly fucking around with the Iroquois national lacrosse team, refusing to admit them on their tribal passports…
A stream of sharp, politically critical films are getting made in Syria, and drawing satellite audiences throughout the Arab world…
The Kampala bombing has taken Somalia’s grinding civil war outside its borders. Violent extremism and blowback terror, emerging from an ineffective and indefinite occupation, are no longer the exclusive property of the west…
Instead of splashy, obvious coups, it’s much easier to pursue the subtle, gradual militarization of the state…
The Balkans had only a few years of feeble rebuilding from war before the recession returned unemployment to its usual crippling level…
The red shirts are on the run, hiding out in northern Chiang Mai as the police drape a heavy blanket of surveillance over Bangkok…
It’s the future: money pours into Brazil in quantities that make luxury-goods vendors giggle, while agricultural villages founded by escaped slaves are wiped off the map for a space-launch complex…
Rampant corruption has helped huge illegal mines spread across India. Two decades of liberalization have paved the way for a dirty kind of primitive accumulation…
Chee Soon Juan would be a run-of-the-mill social democratic opposition politician anywhere else; in Singapore he’s jailed, fined, and hounded from his job…
Pakistan’s hip young radical Islamists are attacking religious minorities in viral text messages and on their facebook page…
When an Indonesian magazine published the names of police generals with millions in the bank, the police scrambled to suppress the leak. Now the magazine’s offices have been firebombed, and the president has ordered an investigation. Carried out by the police, of course… 
A newly translated modern classic evokes a Vilnius crowded with contending and unreliable ghosts and stories…
Trucking slabs of cor-ten steel from New York to Los Angeles; yes, it’s the migration of the Serras… [via]
The tamed and painted fragments of the Berlin Wall obscure how its original graffiti danced between danger, dissent, and Cold War co-optation…
Hyper street music from a warm part of the world, so you know who shows up in a big dumb shirt to holler all over it. Ignore her and give Buraka Sound System its transequatorial Lusophone props:
Reading John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, fifty years after its debut, shows how far ambitious American literature has drifted from mass relevance…
In the moments before they are filled with products and put to use, new commercial spaces look impossibly tranquil and precise…
The 60′s and 70′s gave rise to fervent little architecture magazines with clever, sexy, vivacious covers…
South Africa has recently provided a steady drip of left-field clurb bangers, and sleepier channels are now taking notice of big new chunes like this jumpy tweaker from Tshetsha Boys: [via]
Michael Muhammad Knight saw that Muslim punk didn’t exist, and wrote about it as if it did, upon which it flared into reality…
Alice Neel painted reclining subjects that were uncomfortable in repose, posing deliberately while gnarly, awkward and naked… 
No matter what it does, Japan will spend the next century shrinking and hollowing out. Spike Japan drives the point home with some of the best nonfiction writing on the web… [via]
The media and the public don’t seem to find misogynist violence half as offensive as racism or logorrhea…
Sady Doyle finds Colette groping dimly toward truths about gender and life that her age, and she herself, could not yet name…
B. Traven spent his life slipping between identities, but his biographer chided him for not standing still…
Banks and consultants threw a flurry of debt and derivatives at Greece, then told the Greeks that it was their problem…
Defacing an image of Mao earned Xiaoda Xao twenty years in prison. Now, historian Yuan Tengfei critiques the Helmsman in a popular lecture-as-performance and is regarded as merely edging along a line…
Touchy, hovering motherhood was part of the feminist vision of the family. If it destroys children’s sense of moral accountability, feminist priorities need to drastically change. The argument and various ripostes…
The third generation of homegrown development professionals in Bangladesh can’t remember why they got into it in the first place…
The cells of 19th-century anarchists were thoroughly infiltrated and persecuted, always dwindling in number and always more violent…
“I’m good at seeing what I don’t like. It’s much, much harder to work out what you do like.” Salman Rushdie on Indian religion in the literary imagination…
Eurozine unloads a heap of whoop-ass on the Bologna process, the clanking seige engine of the neoliberal assault on higher education in Europe…
You’ve been wanting an annotated list of good recent books about labor in China, haven’t you? Sure you have. Here you go…
Paul Berman’s anti-Islamist salvo manifests the same dour, closed qualities that it attacks, and equally undermines meaningful inquiry…
Did ur-Digger Gerrard Winstanley help create the turbulent revolutionary atmosphere of late-Stuart England, or was he created by it?…
A strange group of unorthodox Trotskyists have been everywhere in British debate for thirty years, seemingly thriving and well-funded but impossible to pin down…
We used to proclaim the moral imperative of an interdependent world, but now we make the same demands on the basis of the national interest…
Hinge, buffer, or puppet? Georgia has enormous decisions to make, but no real effective politics with which to make them…
Conventional macroeconomics is teetering at the edge of reason. But even deficit doves could cue a deflationary spiral…
Students and politicians will be happy with a knowledge dump, but don’t confuse it with actual education…
It turns out that Larry McMurtry doesn’t even live in Texas. He lives in Arizona, where he despairs at a border and a law that defies history…
Pompous, suspicious “liberals” demand the right to decide which Islams are acceptable. They hate Tariq Ramadan because he talks over and past them…