Section: The Atlantic (USA)
The Confused Person’s Guide to the Iran Deal
The 12 steps should be self-evident, but please consult the Arab Street for further information. (Karl Sharro / Institute of Internet Diagrams) In recent days, some Arab leaders have warned darkly about the consequences of the new nuclear agreement with Iran. But how controversial is the deal in Arab countries, really? How do Arabs feel? As ever...
Denying Genocide in the Face of Science
Women mourn at the gravesite of a relative killed in the Srebrenica massacre. (Dado Ruvic / Reuters) SREBRENICA, Bosnia—Scientific advances in DNA identification over the past 15 years have helped war-crimes investigators document, to an unprecedented extent, the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys around this town in 1995. Yet even as...
What Anger Over the Iran Deal Is Really About
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry during the Iran nuclear talks in Vienna, Austria (Carlos Barria / AP) “Mankind faces a crossroads,” declared Woody Allen. “One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” The point is simple: In life, what matters most...
Haiti’s Unstoppable Outbreak
Parkin Parkin / Mosaic In early February, when Jenniflore Abelard arrived at her parents’ house high in the hills of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, her father Johnson was home. (Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of patients and family members.) He was lying in the yard, under a tree, vomiting. When Jenniflore spoke to him, his...
How Greece Became European
The School of Athens (Raphael / Public domain) Greece is the cradle of European civilization, but is it even in Europe? The answer might seem obvious: The country is on the European landmass, of course, and it’s part of the European Union—for now at least. But the question has been fraught, and the answers have been unstable, contingent,...
The Best Way to Day-Drink Is With Low-Alcohol Brews
Nguyen Huy Kham / Reuters “Beer,” writes the Egyptologist Wolfgang Helck, “could easily have been discovered by chance.” The Babylonians and ancient Egyptians didn’t have microbrewing supplies, but they had grains—grains that would, from time to time, get wet, interact with airborne yeasts, and voila, a brewski was born. That’s...
How to Write About World War III
A Chinese ship steams through the southern Indian Ocean. (Greg Wood / Reuters) One of us first fought World War III from the backseat of a station wagon headed toward Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. For the other, it was at an island cabin on the Puget Sound waters of Washington state. We wouldn’t meet for another couple decades, but like...
Forgetting Afghanistan
Carlos Barria / Reuters Since publishing a book on America’s age of unwinnable conflicts a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been asked hundreds of questions about topics ranging from ISIS to Ukraine, from the military-industrial complex to reinstating the draft. But I can’t recall a single person asking me about the war in Afghanistan....
The Cold War Never Really Ended
Mike McQuade To those who lived through it, the night of November 9, 1989, seemed to mark a new epoch in human history. The Berlin Wall was suddenly undefended, in a single delirious moment that promised to end the Cold War division of Europe. Two years later, the Soviet Union would be dissolved. Elected leaders would govern Russia for the first...
The G7’s Greek and Russian Headaches
Markus Schreiber / AP Angela Merkel and Barack Obama kicked the day off with a breakfast beer. Before you judge them too harshly, consider the agenda they’ve got ahead of them at the G7 summit. You might want a crisp weissbeer to start the day too. Obama arrived in Germany fresh from delivering a moving eulogy for Beau Biden, the vice...
