by Jonathan Guyer
Cairo—The cityscape looks a bit different these days. Buildings are sporting a darker layer of dust, and graffiti—provocative, elaborate, and in defiance of the regime—is everywhere. Walk beyond Tahrir Square and you’ll see a snake with Mubarak’s wife as its head, hieroglyphic renditions of the uprising, and psychedelic memorials to the revolution’s martyrs. Graffiti, nearly absent prior to 2011, is now so ubiquitous it’s almost passé. …
by Andrés Martinez
The debate over gay marriage pits two visions of America against each other, and I worry that the least enlightened one, bolstered by President Obama, is carrying the day.
I am not talking about the issue of whether marriage should be limited to heterosexual couples, mind you, but about the timeless question of whether we are to be one cohesive nation whose citizens enjoy the same “privileges and immunities” throughout—or whether, by contrast, we are to be a patchwork of states and communities whose residents’ individual rights vary according to their local community’s prevailing “standards.” …
When we see glimpses of Africa, it’s usually because of a conflict, a safari, or a charity drive. Lanre Akinsiku, a writer from California, is spending a year traveling around Africa, going to lesser-known places to capture everyday moments.
by Lanre Akinsiku
After crossing the border into Botswana, I sat under the shade of a large tree and waited for a ride to the next town, when it started snowing butterflies. Clouds of delicate white butterflies danced in the trees and flowers. Thousands of them, bobbing, floating and swooping in every direction. I’d never seen anything like it before. …
by Ann Kim
Shortly before my 39th birthday, when I was taking a shower, I felt a lump about the size and shape of a pea in my right breast. I felt a chill go through my body. A week later, on my 39th birthday, I got a biopsy. When the doctor called with the results (I was setting out the birthday cake for my older son’s seventh birthday), the news was bad: I had breast cancer. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. It just felt surreal. …
by Konstantin Kakaes
Later this week, a Falcon 9 rocket built by SpaceX, a young company founded by Elon Musk, is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The rocket will carry a Dragon capsule, also built by SpaceX, to the International Space Station. This is being hailed as a conspicuously important achievement because SpaceX, which Musk founded in 2002 with money from his share of PayPal, is a private company. The temptation to celebrate the privatization of space exploration—the unleashing of all those entrepreneurial billionaires to take us where we haven’t been before—is understandable. But it’s also misguided. …
ArticlesFeuilletonFriday, December 3, 2010 How One Family Created Chinese America
PoetryThis week in L.A.From the green room
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