The novels of Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most celebrated and controversial man of letters, have been translated into some 20 languages. His novels Snowand My Name is Red are widely considered world-class achievements. The themes of Pamuk’s oeuvre include the conflict between the East and the West, the tension between Islam and modernity, and the intense melancholia of his native Istanbul. Admirers find his style complex, multilayered and allegorical; detractors find him faddish and incomprehensible.
Is the ruling party of Prime Minister Erdogan a threat to
Turkish democracy? Five experts share their thoughts.
Turkey’s Constitutional Court has agreed to hear a lawsuit brought against the ruling Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish acronym, “AKP”). This lawsuit would ban the party from politics for five years and would remove the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, from office. Does that amount to an assault on Turkish democracy?
On Sunday night, two consecutive explosions in the Güngören district of Istanbul — a poor, crowded, conservative slum near the Atatürk International Airport — killed 17 people, among them five children. The death toll may yet rise. Some 150 more were injured and maimed. It is still unclear who placed the bombs. No one has claimed responsibility. But the terrorist Kurdish organization–the PKK–is the chief suspect.
In the winter fog, the minarets of Istanbul’s Ottoman skyline fade slightly into the sky. The streets turn slick and oily, and the Bosphorus smells powerfully of charcoal, fish, lignite, and oil from the tankers. These massive ships are constantly pulling under the city’s massive concrete bridges, the massiveness of everything suggesting the waterway’s critical geostrategic significance.
LEFT IN DARK TIMES: A STAND AGAINST THE NEW BARBARISM
Bernard-Henri Lévy, Random House, 233 pp., US$ 25.00a
National Review
December 15, 2008
A curious thing happened as I was reading Bernard-Henri Lévy’s latest book: I found myself moved.
It begins with an account of a phone call from Nicolas Sarkozy in March, 2007. Lévy recalls Sarkozy’s triumphant tone as he asked whether Lévy had seen André Glucksman’s article in Le Monde.
Americans with relatives in the earthquake-ravaged country can’t even get our bureaucrats on the phone.
To judge from the State Department’s response to the earthquake in Haiti, our government has not learned the obvious lessons about disaster preparation that it should have after September 11 and Hurricane Katrina. I know, unfortunately, because my family was in Port-au-Prince, where my sister-in-law worked for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. Her father,
Following the deadly Schiphol air crash, Turkish Airlines faces questions about its safety standards.
FIRST POST
March 12, 2009
On the morning of February 25, Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 from Istanbul crashed short of the runway at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, killing nine passengers and crew.
If reading the news prompts you to suspect that the apocalypse is at hand, keep in mind that good news doesn’t sell and that journalists need to make a living. Editors prefer the headline PROTESTS MARRED BY VIOLENCE to the headline PROTESTS REALLY QUITE BORING. Sometimes, however, a boring protest is an important story. Istanbul’s May Day celebrations were generally peaceful and cheerful this year—for the first time since 1977, when 37 people were shot or trampled to death in Taksim Square, the city’s busy consumer center, helping pave the way for the 1980 military overthrow of Turkey’s civilian government. Nonetheless, if you read the news reports, you would have concluded that this year, too, Istanbul’s streets ran red with blood in an orgy of left-wing agitation and police brutality.
In an increasingly urbanized world, earthquakes threaten unprepared cities with mass destruction.
CITY JOURNAL
Summer 2011
Seismic risk mitigation is the greatest urban policy challenge that the world confronts today. If you consider that too strong a claim, try to imagine another way in which bad urban policy could kill a million people in 30 seconds. Yet the politics of earthquakes are rarely discussed, and when discussed, widely misunderstood.
What it was like to be an American in France in the aftermath of 9/11
CITY JOURNAL
9 September 2011
I was in Paris, alone. My father was in Washington, D.C., with his parents. After seeing the images on television, my grandfather, already ill, collapsed. My memories of September 11 are bound up inextricably with my grandfather’s death.
My grandparents were musicians, refugees from the Nazis. They fled to Paris from their native Leipzig in 1933. From my grandfather’s memoirs:
