In the September 10 edition of The New Republic.
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Author: gcaw
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The Future of College?
I wrote about Minerva University for the September Atlantic.
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ISIS: The Ideology of a Caliphate
In the September 1 issue of The New Republic.
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Can Culture Make us Crazy?
Originally appeared in Pacific Standard.
Review of The Truman Show Delusion by Joel and Ian Gold.
In 2003, at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, Dr. Joel Gold met his first patient suffering from what is now called the Truman Show delusion: the belief that he was being stalked by reality television, and that almost everyone was in on the gag but him. Gold’s current book, written with his brother Ian, a philosopher, is an attempt to explain the cultural roots of madness, with Truman Show patients and others as case studies.
UNTIL THE LAST YEAR, when the Central African Republic’s civil war became a humanitarian crisis too dire to ignore, most Americans thought little about the country at all. It has a low global profile in part because it is exceedingly poor, with four out of five people living on less than $2 a day. It has some natural resources, but because it is landlocked by other troubled countries—Chad, Sudan, Congo, and Cameroon—even if a lull in the war allowed it to extract those from the ground, it would still face formidable problems in exporting them.
But for one group, the Central African Republic is anything but ignorable, and in fact is home to an enduring scientific mystery. Geophysicists who map the earth’s magnetic fields have identified a disturbance in the earth’s natural magnetic fields within the Republic. They still have few clues about what causes it, but at least some think it could be key to understanding one of the most dramatic events in the history of the planet.
Three years ago, I asked an Afghan with ties to the Taliban what he had heard about captured Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. He replied that Bergdahl had briefly escaped, then been found hiding in a tree by Kuchi nomads and returned to his captors.
After that, his captors locked him in a dark room, in a cage “for a dog”.
I had no idea if these details were correct – Afghans spin tales, and I had no way to confirm – but preliminary reports suggest that Bergdahl probably did endure punishment worse than anything a court martial might offer.
Originally appeared in The Barnes and Noble Review.
Review of No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald
Long before Edward Snowden selected Glenn Greenwald as the bucket into which he would direct his NSA leaks, Greenwald enjoyed a reputation among his fellow American political bloggers as a man to avoid provoking. He lives in a compound in Rio de Janeiro, surrounded by his beloved dogs, and his style in argument resembles the behavior of a mastiff protecting a beloved chewtoy. Counterargument meets growls and indignation, and long after the arguer has decided to move on to another subject, Greenwald continues to snarl and fight, publishing post upon post, update upon update, and never conceding anything at all, even when he is clearly wrong.
Originally appeared in Perspektif (Turkish).
Graeme Wood 