Section: The Atlantic (USA)
The Tribe: A Silent Movie With a Powerful Voice
Drafthouse Films As if a movie about deaf, school-aged Ukrainian gangsters made entirely without dialogue weren’t an unlikely enough premise for a hit movie, The Tribe—by writer/director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy—is also a real downer. One reviewer said it had her “sobbing uncontrollably with my hands over my head;” another called it the...
Putin Gets Caught in His Own Trap
Dado Ruvic / Reuters Are little green men about to appear on the North Pole? Russia’s claim last week, using an extremely creative interpretation of international law, to exclusive economic rights to nearly half a million square miles of the Arctic Sea was certainly a head-scratcher. Sure, the territory is valuable due to its untapped...
The President Defends His Iran Plan
President Obama after his speech at American University in Washington on Wednesday (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters) On Wednesday at American University, Barack Obama made the case for the Iran nuclear agreement, and against its critics, in a long and detailed speech. The official transcript is here; the C-Span video is here. Later that afternoon, the...
Is This the End of Ukraine’s Peace Process?
A pro-Russian rebel during a training drill in Donetsk (Marko Djurica / Reuters) Mykola Azarov’s call for early elections and “total regime change” in Kiev was a bit of a head-scratcher. The ousted Ukrainian prime minister, after all, is deeply unpopular in his homeland and—with the exception of Ukrainian prosecutors who want to put him on...
Photos of the Week: 7/25-7/31
An alpenhorn performance in Switzerland, a portrait of Vladimir Putin made of spent ammunition from Ukraine, fireworks in North Korea, Prince Charles surprised by an eagle, wildfire in California, protests in the Philippines and Turkey, a sunset in Crimea, and much more. This article was originally published at...
The Aging Stars of Major League Soccer
Mike Segar / Reuters A year ago, at the twilight of a spectacular soccer career playing in England’s Premier League, the midfielder Frank Lampard announced that he had signed with a team that had never kicked a ball before—a team with no history but thousands of fans and very deep pockets. New York City FC, the newly accredited arm of...
Is the United States Selling Out Ukraine?
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the presidential residence in Sochi (Joshua Roberts / Reuters) If you believe all the talk out there lately, Vladimir Putin is not only duplicitous and hypocritical—the Russian president’s also been pretty damn busy recently. Busy cutting secret deals with the...
The Iran Deal and the Rut of History
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks with Hossein Fereydoun and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif (Reuters) “The president said many times he’s willing to step out of the rut of history.” In this way Ben Rhodes of the White House, who over the years has broken new ground in the grandiosity of presidential apologetics, described the...
An Ambiguous Victory for Gay Rights in Europe
The scene in front of Rome’s Colosseum at the city’s gay-pride parade in 2013 (Max Rossi / Reuters) L’amore vince. Sort of. This week, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled in the case of Oliari and Others v. Italy that Italy is obligated to legally recognize and protect same-sex unions. The judgment is an exciting...
How to Disappear a Country
A flag of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic flies behind a statue of Lenin. (Maxim Zmeyev / Reuters) DONETSK, Ukraine—Deep in the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) on Ukraine’s eastern fringe, crumbling statues of Lenin were guarding a century-old coal mine, testifying to a former master who had begun...
