10/14/2011 10:03 pm
Take a close and objective look at the angry demonstrators now gathered on Wall Street, and at similar protest encampments from San Francisco to Madrid. What you see is not simply a vast expression of rage at the crisis enveloping the world of democracy.
The demonstrations also frame a fundamental contradiction...
10/07/2011 4:07 pm
Barga, its fondest promoters love to say, is a “classic example of a Tuscan hilltown.” But what exactly defines the classic appearance of Barga – or for that matter, Tuscany?
The answer, says an exhibition in the entrance hall of Palazzo Pancrazi, home of Barga’s municipal government, is not...
09/27/2011 10:28 pm
When King Abdullah’s speech was released by the Saudi Press Service on Sunday, my first reaction was stunned amazement. The second was to think of Dr. Aisha, a physician I’d met in Riyadh eight years ago.
“Women will be allowed to participate in the Shoura Council as members from the...
09/23/2011 9:49 am
Global stability is held hostage to years of savage terrorism and de facto war in a small corner of the Middle East. The crisis leads to a tense vote before the United Nations, over whether a new member-state should be recognized in the region, with a formal mandate to defend its interests and negotiate...
09/19/2011 3:36 pm
PARIS — Viewed from the airless heights where statisticians crunch numbers, the story of the woman I’ll call Lilly Tan is simple. She is an immigrant in France, a single digit among millions for the statisticians, a warning flag to wave at rallies for the xenophobic political parties that grow...
09/09/2011 10:48 pm
In 1995, the city of Gaziantep, on the southeastern edge of Turkey’s Anatolian plain, was under siege. Its crumbling medieval centre was swamped with refugees from a civil war between insurgent Kurds and the Turkish Army that eventually left 40,000 dead and 3,000,000 people homeless. Along the borderlands...
09/01/2011 3:26 pm
On Sept. 18, 2001, I landed in Cairo on an extended assignment in the Islamic world. It was nearly impossible to find an Egyptian who believed foreign news accounts of the events that had rocked America one week earlier.
Very few would unequivocally condemn the attacks on New York City and Washington,...
08/11/2011 12:12 pm
Is Western democracy coming apart at the seams? A decade ago, only paranoid alarmists would have posed that question.
Today, it may be an expression of cold, brutal realism.
On both sides of the Atlantic – from the fires raging in large stretches of London, to the political chicanery that brought the...
07/25/2011 2:10 am
Barga, Italy – The news from Oslo and Utoya Island shocked Italians. The horrifying carnage was all that anyone talked about this weekend at Caffe Aristo, Barga’s de facto social center, where calcio – soccer – and the latest sexual capers of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi usually...
07/06/2011 11:35 am
BARGA, Italy–My head tells me it’s time to leave. But my heart, for reasons grounded in personal experience, is profoundly wary.
Like almost everyone who has watched, in growing dismay, (article from August last year here) as the war in Afghanistan has dragged mercilessly on, I agree with President...
06/18/2011 1:24 am
“Nothing focuses the mind like a hanging,” the saying goes. In my case, focus came with the sharp edge of a machete held to my throat and a pistol aimed at my head.
Early this spring, the van I was travelling in while on assignment in Guatemala was forced into the jungle by four hooded men. My fellow...
05/24/2011 8:00 pm
The State of Arizona, for many Americans, has come to symbolize anti-immigrant hysteria codified into full-fledged statutory law. Under its highly controversial terms, anyone who simply “appears” to be foreign can be stopped by police and ordered to prove that they are U.S. citizens or legal residents.
In...
05/02/2011 9:59 pm
It might have been a big night at the Olympics, a U.S. hockey team taking home the gold, or, less probably, a victory in the most-watched television event on the planet, soccer’s World Cup. “USA! USA!” shouted the crowds in New York’s Times Square and outside the White House gates in Washington....
11/02/2010 2:49 pm
When 73 artists join forces to present nearly 100 paintings, sculptures, videos and poems on a single theme, the result can’t really be called something as limited as a mostra (“exhibition”). It’s more in the nature of an encyclopaedic survey. In the case of Cave Canem, the event that opened...
09/16/2010 10:05 am
Numbers are the last thing that come to mind when thoughts turn to Tuscany. Paradise is not quantifiable, and few corners of the planet are more suggestive of an earthly paradise than the village-dotted hills that stretch across central Italy from Siena and Florence to the azure Tirrennian Sea.
Yet numbers...
09/07/2010 4:33 pm
andrea guzzoletti outside his studio in Barga this morning pointing to his new QR code ceramic tile linking him to the new iBarga information system
Andrea Guzzoletti’s tour of “Invisible Cities” borrows its title and its thematic structure from the brilliant prose-poem of the late Italo Calvino,...
08/23/2010 4:32 pm
The Taliban control much of the countryside and dozens of key towns. Casualties among U.S. troops and civilians are soaring. The commanding general of NATO and American forces has been forced to resign. Government corruption is rife.
There is little doubt that the situation in Afghanistan is unravelling....
08/05/2010 1:45 am
One way to view the new Internet universe opening around us today is an immense cornucopia, pouring out a endless stream of facts and findings. A revolutionary democratization of knowledge is underway, the cyber pundits proclaim, making more information accessible to more people than at any moment in...
07/25/2010 6:04 pm
The Festa del Centro Storico came to a memorable end Sunday evening, with an exhibition of new paintings by celebrated Scottish artist John Bellany. For many years, Barga has been Bellany’s second home and a favorite subject, along with his birthplace Port Seton. His enduring attachment to...
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