Port-au-Prince’s Territories

From Words Without Borders: “The Story of Serafima Andreyevna”, by Igort (translated by Jamie Richards), Words Without Borders

Vladimir Potanin in Кандидат or Kandidat by Peter Pomerantsev In 2006 I was invited to take part in one of the great adventures of modern broadcasting – conquering the booming Russian television market. The company I was hired by, Potemkin Productions, had been founded by Tim, a British executive...

Vaclav Havel’s Leaving, performed at The Wilma Theatre, Philadephlia, 2010 From World Affairs: No matter how moral, humble, and immune to the temptations of power you are, once you’ve had it, it’s impossible to ever be free of it. It comes to define you as much in its absence...

From Deutsche Welle: Deutsche Welle: “There’s Nothing Wrong with Lucy” is based on the true story of a man you defended, who was accused of sexually abusing one of his daughters… I wonder if your career as a lawyer, which has always been in your second language, made it...

From Sign and Sight: When “The Coming Insurrection” (here in English) was published anonymously in France the state authorities came down hard on its presumed authors. Based on the theories of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, the manifesto calls for political violence and fulminates against democracy and the rule...

From The New Yorker: Just five years after his death, the C.C.P. officially blamed the “mistaken leadership of Mao Zedong” for the “serious disaster and turmoil” of the Cultural Revolution, and the garishly consumerist and inegalitarian China of today seems to mock Mao’s fantasies of a Communist paradise. Nevertheless,...

In Search of Lost Paris | by  Luc Sante

The New York Review of Books

It was often called the “soul” of Paris as well as its “stomach,” and it was destroyed impersonally...

From The New Statesman: As the rain sheeted down, time washed away. I looked down from the rooftop in Saigon where, more than a generation ago, in the wake of the longest war of modern times, I had watched silent, sullen streets awash. The foreigners were gone, at last....

From Washington Monthly: The furniture is, in reality, all very cheap, Yang confides. He bought it from a relative who is in the furniture resale business. Though it may seem a tad gaudy to Western sensibilities, it feels very comfortable to him in its excess. When I and another...