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“... Adam Shatz’s article in this issue first appeared on the LRB blog. You can read it here ...”

“... When​ you first look at this photograph by Ming Smith, it’s not clear what it is you’re seeing. In the left background is a figure – black pants and white sneakers – drowning in light; the face is invisible, gender indeterminate. To the right, closer to the viewer, is another figure, also of indeterminate gender, also bathed in white light, performing an acrobatic movement, perhaps a dance ...”

“... Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea living in Brooklyn, is one of 71 detainees to have died in the last four years in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. An illegal immigrant confined to a detention centre after his green card application was rejected, Bah died after a fall that no one seems to have witnessed. ICE, which was set up by the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, is responsible for the detention of a staggering number of people: 311,213 last year, a million since 2004 ...”

“... Imagine you’re confined to a dark, windowless space, and a piece of music you find especially disagreeable is piped into the room at a volume so piercing it seems to be throbbing inside you. You might call this excruciating. Now imagine the music on a round-the-clock loop, with no indication of when or whether it will stop, and no escape. You might call this torture ...”

“... Condoleezza Rice, like everyone else, is ‘worn down and discouraged by the war’, the New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller writes in her new biography (Random House, $27.95). Early morning work-outs on her ‘elliptical trainer’, shopping at expensive boutiques and American Idol provide some relief. But Rice has found her greatest ‘escape from the anxieties of her day’ – the anxieties she’s done so much to foster – by playing the piano with her chamber ensemble, whose recitals in the capital have ‘attracted a bipartisan audience ...”

“... Shortly before the invasion of Iraq, George Bush’s economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, estimated that the war would cost $200 billion. ‘Baloney,’ Donald Rumsfeld fumed, offering a figure of $50-60 billion, some of which he said would be supplied by America’s friends. Andrew Natsios, the head of the Agency for International Development, told Ted Koppel on Nightline that postwar Iraq could be rebuilt for $1 ...”

“... If you live in an American swing state you may have received a copy of ‘Obsession’ in your Sunday paper. ‘Obsession’ isn’t a perfume: it’s a documentary about ‘radical Islam’s war against the West’. In the last two weeks of September, 28 million copies of the film were enclosed as an advertising supplement in 74 newspapers, including the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education ...”

“... renewed solidarity. This is a weapon that Iron Dome is not designed to contain. 21 MayListen to Adam Shatz talk to Tareq Baconi and Henriette Chacar on the LRB ...”

“... On 16 December, ten days into the unrest in Greece sparked by the killing of a 15-year-old boy by the police, a group of Greek students occupied the National Broadcasting Network. Interrupting a report on a parliamentary address by the prime minister, they raised a banner that read: ‘Stop Watching – Everyone on the Streets!’ Those who joined them would have missed the footage broadcast the same night on Al Tsantiri News, in which hooded men were seen smashing shop windows in Athens with iron clubs, then a short time later chatting amiably with the police ...”

“... Barack Obama is the first American president who has made history simply by being elected. His Swahili first name – which is derived from the Arabic baraka, or spiritual wisdom – means ‘he who is blessed’, and the world seems to think he is. Obama’s victory, Bono said, is the realisation of ‘the Irish dream, the European dream, the African dream, the Israeli dream and also the Palestinian dream ...”

“... to Cairo, from Tunis to Beirut, the outlines of a post-American Middle East can be glimpsed. Adam Shatz wrote about the events in Egypt in the 17 February issue of the ...”

“... When Amy Bishop was hired by the University of Alabama in Huntsville seven years ago, she appeared to have everything going for her: she was young, Harvard-trained, passionate about her field, a mother of four. But there were many things that her new colleagues didn’t know. They didn’t know her adviser at Harvard had forced her to resign her post-doctoral fellowship ...”

“... Israel is likely to launch a strike against uranium-enrichment sites in Iran within a year. Or so Jeffrey Goldberg reports in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly. If the Iranians continue to defy the International Atomic Energy Agency and Obama refuses to pursue a more muscular punishment, he warns, an Israeli attack is a ‘near certainty ...”

“... At​ a recent event at the National Gallery in Washington, the painter Oliver Lee Jackson recalled hearing Charlie Parker and Max Roach play at nightclubs in the 1950s. Jackson, who was born in 1935, grew up during the Bebop revolution, and the kinetic language of his canvases echoes the freedom and spontaneity of jazz performance. But what most impressed him about the musicians he loved were the moments just before a set got going, when the lights were dimmed and the musicians began ‘very, very softly – touching silence tenderly or harshly’, or when Roach hit his snare drum, ‘lording it in the theatre ...”

“... On 4 July, the day after the army overthrew Mohamed Morsi and suspended the constitution, I got an email from a friend in Cairo. A photograph of the 30 June demonstrations in Tahrir Square was emblazoned with the words: ‘This is not a coup’. He didn’t say what else it might be, but soon enough others did. A second revolution, a ‘people’s coup’, a ‘re-colution’: terms coined to describe how the events felt to them, or perhaps to bridge the discomfiting gap between experience and reality ...”