movies

A wedding at Lake Qarga, Kabul, in The Black Tulip.

Full Bloom: A Light Shines Through as The Black Tulip Blossoms Amidst Harsh Censorship and Brutal Rule by the Taliban

Afghanistan has no film industry, which makes a new movie called The Black Tulip, about good people seeking some kind of normal life in modern Kabul despite the constant threat of violence, destruction and despair, doubly dangerous to have made and inestimably valuable to watch. Filmed entirely in a country where women’s rights are still tested daily and cameras are so verboten that even a tourist’s throwaway Instamatic is an invitation to trouble—and produced, written and directed by a woman, no less!—this is a gripping experience as politically enlightening and emotionally involving as it is educational and beautiful to look at.  Read More

Travels

Gillibrand Wants Out of Afghanistan

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand reiterated her support of the July 2011 Afghanistan withdrawal date, despite Republican pressure to move the date back, in a conference call with reporters about her recent trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan this afternoon.  She said the withdrawal date is useful as “a political tool.”

“It creates a sense of urgency on Read More

Time Story's 'Point of View' Mirrors CIA's

Let’s just get this out of the way: The CIA doesn’t hire working journalists. Not American ones, anyway. It stopped in 1976 after an embarrassing investigation by Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) revealed that infiltrating news teams was just one of several bad habits dating to the 1950s. But we can’t help imagining the clinking of Read More

A Crushing Legacy of Bush

From now on, the headlines about Afghanistan will be slugged “Obama’s War,” and perhaps that is fair enough given the president’s many endorsements of what he has called a war of necessity. It would be much less fair, however, to ignore the events that led us to this moment, when whatever choice he makes will Read More