Tag: fairy tale
Orhan Pamuk’s Literature of Paranoia
Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, Nights of Plague, is set mainly on Mingheria, a “fairy-tale,” “otherworldly,” and fictional Ottoman island—a “pearl of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea,” or so say the painters and tourists enchanted by its rugged mountains and its pink-stone capital, which glows when seen from afar. But behind the Orientalist fantasia lies a microcosm of empire at the point of collapse. In 1901, a bubonic plague breaks out. Pamuk will use it to expose the infirmities of
Why ‘The Dropout’ Succeeds Where Other Scammer Shows Fall Short
A familiar voice opens the latest episode of The Dropout, Hulu’s series about the fall of the infamous blood-testing start-up Theranos: “You founded this company 12 years ago, right? Tell them how old you were.” It’s former President Bill Clinton, praising the company founder and figurehead, Elizabeth Holmes, as played by Amanda Seyfried. “I was 19,” Seyfried replies in Holmes’s near-parodic baritone, to a wave of admiring laughter and applause.
Clinton isn’t played by an actor. It’s the actual
What Biden Must Do to Right the Wrongs of Guantánamo
Many Americans like to tell themselves a story about the choices the country makes in times of national crisis. We see our country’s policies as a pendulum. We may overreact at first, temporarily sacrificing principles and rights to meet the emergency at hand. But eventually the crisis recedes, and in restoring our commitment to foundational principles and the rule of law, we push the pendulum back toward equilibrium.
This story is comforting; it makes sense of America’s reactions to crises