“I grew up in a time where history in a way was taught primarily in the aftermath of the Second World War,” Lebanese sculptor Rayanne Tabet tells New Lines magazine’s Rasha Elass. “But I became convinced that our contemporary condition is really led by these moments in the 19th century, where language around the creation of nations, language around cultural ... Show More
Yesterday
Why the Internet Got Bad, and How To Fix It
<p>On this week’s episode, bestselling author and tech blogger Cory Doctorow joins Faisal Al Yafai on the podcast to discuss why the internet has steadily, but noticeably, become unusable, as he sets out in his new book “Enshittification.”</p>
<p>Produced by Finbar Anderson</p>
59m 38s
Nov 2021
Bahia Shehab and Haytham Nawar, "A History of Arab Graphic Design" (AU of Cairo Press, 2020)
Arab graphic design emerged in the early twentieth century out of a need to influence, and give expression to, the far-reaching economic, social, and political changes that were taking place in the Arab world at the time. But graphic design as a formally recognized genre of visua ... Show More
43m 41s
May 2014
Marwa Elshakry, “Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marwa Elshakry‘s new book offers a fascinating window into the ways that thi ... Show More
59m 49s
Nov 2021
Bahia Shehab and Haytham Nawar, "A History of Arab Graphic Design" (AU of Cairo Press, 2020)
Arab graphic design emerged in the early twentieth century out of a need to influence, and give expression to, the far-reaching economic, social, and political changes that were taking place in the Arab world at the time. But graphic design as a formally recognized genre of visua ... Show More
43m 41s
Jun 2020
Lara Harb, "Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a delightful and formidable study on the details and development of poetics and aesthetics in medieval Arabic literature. The central theme of this splendid book ... Show More
1h 3m
Mar 2022
Sarah-Neel Smith, "Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey" (U California Press, 2022)
Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey (University of California Press, 2022) is a vivid portrait of the art world of 1950s Turkey in which Sarah-Neel Smith offers a new framework for analyzing global modernisms of the twentieth century: economic development. ... Show More
49m 49s
Jul 2020
Ahmed El-Shamsy, "Rediscovering the Islamic Classics" (Princeton UP, 2020)
Ahmed El-Shamsy’s Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2020) is an astonishing scholarly feat that presents a detailed, sophisticated, and thoroughly enjoyable intellectual and social ... Show More
1h 16m
Feb 2022
No, the Ancient Greeks Weren’t Color Blind. They Justed Had Unique Ways to Describe the World
Were ancients color-blind? They weren’t but this idea has been passed around for centuries, usually by classicists confused by the Greeks’ odd choice of descriptive language. Homer, author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, the first ‘great’ poet of western civilization described the ... Show More
47m 32s
Jun 2021
Donna Stein, "The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected and Rediscovered Modern Art" (Skira, 2021)
In the 1970s, American curator Donna Stein served as the art advisor to Empress Farah Diba Pahlavi, the Shahbanu of Iran. Together, Stein and Pahlavi generated an art market in Iran, as Stein encouraged Pahlavi’s patronage of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Today, the cont ... Show More
47m 25s
Jul 2023
Ilkim Büke Okyar, "Arabs in Turkish Political Cartoons, 1876-1950: National Self and Non-National Other" (Syracuse UP, 2023)
The emergence of Turkish nationalism prior to World War I opened the way for various ethnic, religious, and cultural stereotypes to link the notion of the “Other” to the concept of national identity. The founding elite took up a massive project of social engineering that now requ ... Show More
1h 9m