On December 1, 2009, a year after America elected its first black president, two candidates, one white and one black, faced off in runoff election to determine who would become Atlanta’s 60th mayor. Mary Norwood, the white candidate, had come 3,000 votes away from avoiding the runoff and becoming the city’s first white mayor since … Read more
For Taiwan and much of East Asia, homosexuality has long been a taboo subject. In the influential 1988 novel Crystal Boys, directly translated from Mandarin as “sons of sin,” Pai Hsien-yung tells the story of growing up gay in 1970s Taipei: “As soon as the sun comes up, our kingdom goes into hiding, for it … Read more
On October 15, a truck full of explosives crashed through a barrier near the Safari Hotel in Mogadishu’s commercial district. The bombs killed at least 358 Somalis and wounded over 400 more. Two weeks later, another suicide driver murdered at least 27 people, prompting the municipal government to issue a daytime ban on trucks inside … Read more
Farai Sevenzo did not expect it to happen. A Zimbabwean-born journalist who covers sub-Saharan Africa, Sevenzo noted in a CNN op-ed that for over two decades, he has “witnessed with [his] camera the slow deterioration of people’s hopes in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.” On the morning of November 18, he woke up praying for the best. … Read more
Center-left parties in the United Kingdom held an iron grip on power for centuries, but the current political realm is dominated by Labour and the Conservatives. Between the inception of the Whig party in 1721 and the end of the Liberal party in 1988, the center-left produced 30 prime ministers. It seemed to be an … Read more