Columbus
Coda Story
My mother tongues
My father, Swapan Dasgupta, was born near Calcutta in April 1947, just four months before India became an independent nation. By 1947, India had been transformed under British rule from a global center of economic production into an exemplar of deprivation, of hunger, of sickness, and of dire, desperate poverty. Its economic progress in the first decades after independence—until reforms were executed around 1991—was only ever fitful, sluggish. The phrase “Hindu rate of growth” was used as a pejorative to describe India’s performance compared to the “tiger” economies of Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. Young men like my father, without the resources or connections to match their ambition, left India as soon as they were able.
On brotherhood and blindness
All my life I’ve known versions of blindness. It began at a very young age when, from certain angles I would see two of everything – two homes, two cars, two of the same boy in kindergarten who wanted to fight me and did, two mothers, two of the Turkish dayah whom I always considered my real mother.
Silicon Valley’s sci-fi dreams of colonizing Mars
It was a late spring evening in Devon, England, in May 2021. Even before we saw the satellites, the party had become surreal: it was one of the first gatherings in the region since the pandemic had begun. We were camping in tipis in a field overlooking the Jurassic Coast, the ocean thundering below. Inside the biggest tent, people were singing, smoking, shouting. The evening was unraveling. Someone—masked, costumed—stuck his face inside the flap and yelled, with great theater: “Starlink is visible! Starlink is visible!”
What makes a nation?
This story is published in collaboration with Stranger’s Guide magazine as part of the Complicating Colonialism series, which explores how unfinished conversations about the past play out in our daily lives and shape our collective future. The history of Russian occupation in Georgia dates back more than 200 years....
The revolutionary lives of Frantz Fanon
In November 1960, a traveler of ambiguous origin, brown-skinned but not African, arrived in Mali. Issued in Tunis two years earlier, his passport identified him as a doctor born in 1925 in Tunisia, height: 165 cm, color of hair: black, color of eyes: black. The pages were covered with stamps from Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Guinea, Italy. The name on the passport, a gift from the government of Libya, was Ibrahim Omar Fanon, a nom de guerre. The psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was not from Tunisia but from Martinique. He had not come to Mali to do medical work: he was part of a commando unit.
Fear and hope in wartime Gaza
In a small smoked-filled café in Cairo six months after the start of the latest Israeli-Gaza war, I sat with Dr. Yasser Abu-Jamei, a soft-spoken man whose suit jacket hung loosely on his light frame. He had escaped Gaza eleven days earlier and had the physique of a man who had not eaten enough for months. When I asked him what the first night out of Gaza felt like, he described how strange it was to wake up and realize he was surrounded by walls and a roof rather than the flapping of a tent. He, his wife and their six children, along with 15 other families, had spent the past three months in a makeshift encampment in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip.
When sameness becomes a colonial tool of oppression
Former Soviet Republics have a lot in common with countries that have struggled against Western colonialism. So why don't we tend to see Russia as a colonizer?. “My issue with the French language,” Khadim said, pouring sticky-sweet, minty tea into my glass, “is that I love hating it.” His words struck a chord: I realized that I had the same relationship with another language. It was dusk. We were sitting on the rooftop of Khadim’s parents house in Amite III, a residential neighborhood in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, where I was spending my study abroad year. I was 20, and obsessed with West Africa, its history, and the tea-fueled evenings with Khadim and his fellow philosophy student friends, who had a knack for stretching my mind beyond its comfort zones.
I risked prison to keep the Uyghur culture alive
I knew Ramadan would start on June 28 because someone in the cell before us had carved a calendar into the wall with their fingernail. Late at night, after the task of watching over the other prisoners was assigned, someone else in our cell was selected to scratch off the old day. Everyone would bicker among themselves for the chance to erase another day of their sentence, but since I believed that I would be in there for life, the calendar didn’t interest me much. I’d often forget to mark it when it was my turn.
Rising above the noise
Whenever I am asked why I decided to become a journalist, an image from my childhood pops into my head. It’s dusk. I am 10, sitting in the kitchen with my mom. She is glued to a shortwave radio. Outside, the Soviet Union is on a cusp of collapse. Georgia, where we are, is on the brink of a civil war. We don’t use the term, but fake news is all that we get at home through common channels. That makes the real news — coming from the West — a lifeline. I am in awe of the crackling radio that has my mother’s full attention; I want to become that voice.
Georgia at the crossroads: Why the country’s mass protests matter far beyond its borders
Georgia has become a new front line in the global battle against rising authoritarianism. With thousands on the street protesting a new “foreign agent” law inspired by the Kremlin’s own legislation, the country’s centuries-long struggle for freedom faces a turning point. “I was trying to film,...
I’m protesting Georgia’s ‘Russian law.’ The police beat me up mercilessly
One Gen-Z protester’s story of police brutality in Tbilisi, where tens of thousands are marching on the streets to protest the Kremlin-inspired 'foreign agents' law. Georgia is in turmoil over a draft law that seeks to stamp out opposition, independent media and activist groups by forcing them to declare their foreign funding sources. The Georgian government says it will make the country more transparent. But the law, which has now been approved by parliament, is a carbon copy of Russia’s foreign agents legislation, which Vladimir Putin’s government has used to wipe out all remnants of a democratic society in Russia. The foreign agents law, which pushes Georgia towards Russia’s orbit, is a major shift in the country’s direction. Since mid-April, the Georgian capital Tbilisi has erupted with protests, with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets each day.Luka Gviniashvili, 24, is part of the protests’ impassioned contingent of Gen Z participants, who are leaders in the movement.
In Russia, the ‘worst is happening in the present’
Russia is not democratic. But it holds elections anyway. This year, the presidential election feels particularly farcical because it follows barely a month after the death of Alexei Navalny. As a Russian journalist in exile, Navalny’s death felt to me like the most cruel, if not final, nail in the coffin of the opposition.
An unseen interview with Vladimir Kara-Murza: ‘Putin’s propaganda has taught us not to trust a lot of things’
On the day of Alexei Navalny’s funeral in Moscow last week, I held my nose and turned on Russian state television. The evening news on state TV, which is still watched by millions across Russia, led with a funeral. Except it wasn’t Navalny’s. Nikolai Ryzhkov, the last prime minister of the Soviet Union who died at the age of 94 on February 28, was also buried on the same day. He laid in state in Moscow’s main Christ the Savior Cathedral, surrounded by a handful of solemn apparatchiks from Russia’s ruling party. There was no mention on state TV of the alternative vision of Russia that was being buried that day or of the tens of thousands of people who defied the heavy police presence and walked across the city to pay their final respects to Navalny.
How tech design is always political
Facebook has a long-maligned yet still active feature called “People You May Know.” It scours the network’s data troves, picks out the profiles of likely acquaintances, and suggests that you “friend” them. But not everyone you know is a friend. Anthropologist Dragana Kaurin told me...
How Big Tech let down Navalny
As if the world needed another reminder of the brutality of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, last Friday we learned of the untimely death of Alexei Navalny. I don’t know if he ever used the term, but Navalny was what Chinese bloggers might have called a true “netizen” — a person who used the internet to live out democratic values and systems that didn’t exist in their country.
Who is the real Javier Milei?
Residents of Buenos Aires flooded the city’s sprawling avenues and plazas last week, cookware and kitchen utensils in hand, to literally bang out their fury over a head-spinning series of economic and public policy changes that are deeply dividing Argentina. In what’s been described as “shock therapy” for the country’s failing economy, sectors from healthcare to construction have been deregulated, labor rights have been gutted and nine out of 18 state ministries have been eliminated altogether.
Israel and ”the crime of crimes”
On January 26, the International Court of Justice in the Hague ruled that Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza and blocking of humanitarian aid to the enclave could “plausibly” amount to genocide. South Africa, which brought the case, did not get the court-ordered ceasefire it was aiming for, but the judges warned Israel that it must ensure that it does not violate the U.N. Genocide Convention. They also ordered Israel to prevent and punish domestic incitement to genocide, as well as allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Taiwan confronts China’s disinformation behemoth ahead of vote
On a sunny morning in Taipei last August, I joined a few dozen other people at the headquarters of the Kuma Academy for an introductory course in civil defense. We broke into groups to introduce ourselves. As our group leader presented us to the room, she mistakenly called me a “war correspondent.”
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