Politics
Axl Rose Just Took a Shot at Steve Mnuchin, and The Treasury Secretary Fired Back
Axl Rose is the most enigmatic of rock stars. The Guns N’ Roses front man doesn’t release music nearly often enough, and he’s not prolific on social media. When he does unleash, oh boy, folks pay attention. The Hall of Famer let fly with a tweet Wednesday night, taking full aim at Steve Mnuchin, the polarizing Secretary of the Treasury. “It’s official! Whatever anyone may have previously thought of Steve Mnuchin he’s officially an asshole,” Rose tweeted. It’s official! Whatever anyone may have previously thought of Steve Mnuchin he’s officially an asshole. — Axl Rose (@axlrose) May 6, 2020 Mnuchin, who looks like a guy who’s great at counting money but not big on beefs, actually shot back. “What have you done for the country lately?,” reads his tweet, which he completed with an emoji...
An Elegy for Karachi’s Empress Market
The dismantling of Karachi’s markets and informal shops isn’t just robbing the city of its soul. It threatens the survival of the very people that make it a city. A group of women in faded patterned saris sits by the side of a road, some shaded by umbrellas, with bags of dried nuts in front of them—almonds, pistachios, cashews. The image would rack up a lot of Instagram likes, if it weren’t for the devastating landscape—mounds of sand, steamrolled expanses, clouds of dust, debris, and the stark sight of a building smack in the middle. Or that these women aren’t sitting on a pavement, protected and secure in their work. They’re on the side of the road, an easy target for harassment, being pushed out from the only place they’ve ever worked, where their fathers worked, and where their childre...
Havana Youth: Q&A with Greg Kahn
Photographer Greg Kahn’s new book explores youth culture in Cuba. Greg Kahn was sitting at his fixer’s house in Cuba one night when he heard the thump of a bass beat echoing through the streets. He wandered outside, where he found a plaza with hundreds of kids dancing to electronic music. “It was current music that I had been listening to in the States,” Kahn said. “It just totally flipped that idea of everything that Cuba is.” Khan points to this moment as the foundation for his work over the next two years, and the subject of his new book “Havana Youth” (Yoffy Press). “Havana Youth” (Yoffy Press) “Havana Youth” is the DC-based freelancer’s first book, and its pages reveal the color and vibrancy of young Cuban society, brought to life by Khan’s meticulous attention to detail and intimate ...
Chyno: Beirut Battle Rap
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 ...
Gilles Khoury: The Heart of the Lebanese Revolution
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. ...
Ghosts of Tokyo: A Q&A with Barry Yourgrau
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 ...
Farrah Berrou: Into the Beqaa Valley
Farrah Berrou takes The Trip into Lebanon’s wine country. It’s 6:45am and Farrah Berrou, host of the podcasts B is for Bacchus and A Better Beirut, is picking me up in her mom’s car to make the climb out of Beirut, past snow-capped mountains, dusty villages, endless military checkpoints, almost to the border of Syria itself, for a full day of Lebanese wine. We’re going to Domaine Wardy, one of the great wineries of the Beqaa Valley, a winery whose roots started out actually in Aleppo, Syria, long ago. But before that, it’s time for an early-morning trip to Baalbek, the ruins of the colossal roman temple of Bacchus, the god of, among other things, wine and group sex. What a combination, what a testament to the eternal determination of the people in this part of the world to live, and live w...
Tom Tillotson: The Midnight Voter
This week on The Trip podcast: Drinking baijiu with Tom Tillotson in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire. At the stroke of midnight in the high mountains near the Canadian border, in a lodge on the property of the abandoned Balsams Resort, there’s a table covered with red-white-and-blue bunting, a podium, two closet-sized voting booths. Five voters, 30 journalists, four TV trucks, two cakes celebrating the 60th anniversary of the midnight voting at Dixville Notch, NH. Now, you may think this a departure from our usual subjects. But for me, the performative small-town democracy of New Hampshire’s primaries has always been the stuff of drinking podcasts. Photographer Shane Carpenter and I were first dragged up here to Dixville Notch 16 years ago by a hard-drinking fringe presidential candida...
Eva Castillo: Manchester Defender
This week on The Trip podcast: Eva Castillo on Presidential politics and immigrant advocacy in New Hampshire in the time of Trump. So this was it, election day in New Hampshire, the real starting gun of the race is that is now settling in. And if the Democratic primary looks a bit different nationally than it did when New Hampshire’s results started rolling in (Rest in peace, campaign of Mayor Buttigieg), critics of the first-in-the-nation primary usually point to one main factor: race. The numbers don’t lie: New Hampshire is a very Caucasian state. It is 93% white; that’s like, whiter-than-Wyoming White. Not to be essentialist here, but that not only affects how voters respond to candidates, but also how candidates respond back to voters; the kind of questions they get asked in those famo...
‘Becoming’ Doc Reveals Michelle Obama Was “Disappointed” In Black Voters For 2016 Turnout
Source: Netflix / Courtesy of Netflix Michelle Obama is clearly disappointed with Black people who didn’t come out to vote in the 2016 presidential election, and she’s letting her frustrations known in her upcoming Netflix documentary “Becoming.” According to the New York Post, Michelle Obama says it was a “slap in the face’’ that minorities didn’t go to the polls in 2016 — and has no plans on re-entering the political spotlight amid a push to make her Joe Biden’s running mate. “It takes some energy to go high, and we were exhausted from it … when you’re the first black anything,’’ Michelle Obama explained in the film, referencing husband Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential win. “You know, the day I left the White House, it was painful to sit on that stage, and then a lot of our folks didn’t ...
Zoltan Istvan: The Transhumanist Candidate
This week on The Trip podcast: Zoltan Istvan has come from the future with a message New Hampshire doesn’t want to hear. Here they are in the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office, paying their thousand dollars to be on the official primary ballot. They are the lesser-known candidates, the dramatic fringe of each presidential primary election up here. And they are the stars of my quadrennial quixotic reporting project with photographer Shane Carpenter. And listen, they aren’t like Tom Steyer lesser-known, they’re like Vermin Supreme lesser-known, Mary Maxwell lesser-known, Zoltan Istvan lesser-known. Almost nobody knows these people, but they’re running anyway. This is the fifth primary that Shane and I have spent ducking out of mainstream campaign press events to track down the people...
Electioneering on the Eve of the Virus
Nathan Thornburgh and photographer Shane Carpenter were in New Hampshire last month for their longterm reporting project on the state’s odd presidential primary. In hindsight, it looks more surreal than ever. It is unnerving to look at the pictures at this moment, in this week. Photographer Shane Carpenter and I have been working on a longterm project about the New Hampshire presidential primary for four election cycles spanning 16 years, but the things I’ve come to love about the campaign up there—the intimacy of retail politicking, the electricity of the big rallies—now just trip alarms in my mind. All the handshakes. All the pressed flesh, the leaning in, the campaign buses filled with coughing staffers, the moist microphones, the communal pens at the polls. The collective spittle of a ...
