The police archive sits in a cemetery of confiscated cars at the edge of Zone 6 in Guatemala City. Behind the high wall of the police-headquarters complex, the cars are piled three, four, even five high, their rusted bodies giving the area...
I thought of waiting until tomorrow to begin but decided that elegies are better written in the middle of the night—and an elegy for Mahmoud Darwish is best written in a country where one feels foreign, gazing at a dark horizon with a...
I read “The Dice Player” in its entirety in an Arabic newspaper right after Darwish read the poem for the first time in Ramallah in June 2008—what would be his last public appearance in that city.
On the night of August 3, 1944—in the hot crickety darkness of Riga, Latvia—my grandparents did two remarkable things. After midnight, while his children were sleeping, my grandfather—Harijs Mindenbergs—sat down at the kitchen table and...
Recently, I came across a photo on the web of prisoners in Guantánamo. You know the one: shot at close range through a chain-link fence, we see a line of detainees in orange jumpsuits—hooded, hands tied, bent over and broken. They are the...
In early October 2007, almost three years to the day after I began my career as a journalist in Russia, a conversation with a former CIA agent brought it to an end.
In 1827, Thomas de Quincey suggested that murder was becoming a new medium for the artist: “People begin to see,” he wrote, “that something more goes into the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed, a knife...
