Yasmine El Rashidi

Pandemic Journal, March 23–29

Brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world, including Michael Greenberg in Brooklyn, Raquel Salas Rivera in San Juan, Aida Alami in Paris, Rahmane Idrissa in Niamey, and more.

Growing Up in Hell

The Refugee Crisis Center-Stage

The Jungle, a play by two British writers, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, grapples with the two sides of life in the camp near Calais, France, in equal measure harsh and hopeful. After some months working there as volunteers, they created this drama—originally performed in the camp by its refugee inhabitants.

Writing as Fast as Reality

A master craftsperson, Ali Smith seems to be completely liberated from ideas of what a novelist should be or do.

Toughing It Out in Cairo

Can we find meaning in being engaged again?

On Robert Silvers

Nineteen writers remember The New York Review’s editor.

Caught Between Worlds

Mohsin Hamid’s ‘Exit West’

Cairo Without End

Floating between fiction and autobiography, Egyptian filmmaker Tamer El Said’s first film, In the Last Days of the City, captures the continuities between the decades preceding the 2011 revolution, and the stark reality that has emerged since.

Egypt, 41 Months Later

It has been almost four years since Uncle died. Forty-one months since the revolution. Like all my friends I find it hard to sleep through the night.

Egypt: Face to Face

Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s “Our House Is On Fire,” a new series of works about Egyptians since the revolution, captures a reality that has been all but overlooked in the continuing story of the Arab uprisings.

What We Learned in Tahrir

Jehane Noujaim’s documentary about the Egyptian uprising, The Square, shows how a minority of exceedingly righteous idealists, somewhat privileged, are now fighting a growing majority who increasingly opt for stability over the more ambitious political goals to which the revolution first aspired.

Misunderstood Egypt

Violence in Cairo

A series of videos reveals a more complex reality of what happened in the August 14, 2013 crackdown on protesters in Cairo.

Misunderstood Egypt

Egypt in the Raw

After discovering Hemingway in an Egyptian prison, the young novelist Sonallah Ibrahim set out to capture the reality of Egyptian oppression on everyday life and transformed Arabic literature in the process. Now, his breathtakingly subversive first novel, That Smell, has been published in English in a brilliant new translation by Robyn Creswell.

Egypt: The Rule of the Brotherhood

Egypt: Whose Constitution?

For all the millions of Egyptians who have lost patience with the new leadership, there are many others who continue to crave stability, even if the price is another authoritarian government.

Egypt: The Hidden Truth

Government ministries keep going even when they no longer exist

Egypt: The Mayhem

From their position as the apparent protectors of last year’s revolution, Egypt’s military rulers have been pushed into increasingly brutal confrontations with civilians—at Maspero in October, during the run-up to elections in November, and most recently, during a week of mayhem in mid December. Peaceful protesters are arbitrarily being arrested and thrown in jail; and the army’s estrangement from the activists who led the revolution is visible in the newly-erected concrete walls that sever downtown streets to separate its forces from the people. These spasms of violence, as important to the future of Egypt as the outcome of elections, often seem to have a logic of their own; December’s episode was set off by a chain of events few could have predicted.

Egypt on the Edge

The future of Islamist-dominated Egypt