Politics

This week on The Trip podcast: Beirut-based, Syrian-Filipino rapper Chyno on Lebanon, rap, and revolution. I’ve been thinking here in Beirut about the many-sided… let’s call them gifts, that America has given to the Middle East. And of course when you wade into it, when you look at yourself and your country in the mirror, you’ve first got to walk your mind through a vast swamp of evil action and intention. From cluster bombing to propping up Saudi hoodlums to supporting the instincts of Israel’s politics, there’s a lot to regret, past, present and future. But tucked inside the exports of empire, sort of the opposite of a poison pill, there’s also this wonderful counter-programming, an exported American liberalism, a real and instinctual belief in free speech that is a beacon for many ...

This week on The Trip podcast: journalist (and protestor) Gilles Khoury on what sparked the Lebanese revolution and what’s next. Welcome to the Egg, the battleworn concrete theater that has become epicenter of Lebanon’s revolution, where today a rally of small business owners and entrepreneurs kicks off with a singing of the national anthem. Small business is the heartbeat of Lebanon’s economy, and they’ve been terribly affected by the banking crisis since the revolution began, leading to a wave of layoffs across the country. Our guide here is a singular voice in Lebanese media, a young writer named Gilles Khoury who writes a weekly, whimsical slice-of-life column for the French-language paper L’Orient Le Jour, about Beirutis and their hopes and dreams, and lately, about their revolution. ...

An author brings his flair for the fantastic to old Tokyo. Writer and performer Barry Yourgrau is a master of the surreal, intense, funny, and sometimes very short story. His eccentric career includes writing for The New Yorker and The Paris Review (among others) as well as starring both in the film adaptation of his memoir and in a music video for the heavy metal band Anthrax. I first met him with his partner, the author Anya von Bremzen, in Istanbul sometime in the mid-aughts, but it’s his deep, long-standing relationship with Japan, where his work has a steadfast following, that fascinates me most. He is the only American author to publish short fiction specifically for Japanese cellphones—an early form of viral smartphone content known as keitai sosetsu, or cell phone novels. His next ...