Suzanne Charle

The Looming Tower author has turned his extensive journalistic investigations of terrorism and radical Islam into a powerful stage play.

For decades, the artist Fernando Botero has been best known for the distinct and playful look of his paintings and drawings — filled with colorful, rotund, almost balloon-like characters, in compositions that suggest that all’s right with the world. While establishing Botero as one of the world’s most recognized living artists, the naïve, folksy quality […]

Two years ago the singer-songwriter John Hall — co-founding member of the ’70s soft-rock band Orleans — challenged George W. Bush directly, when the president used the Orleans hit “Still the One” as his reelection campaign theme without permission. “As a promoter of an ‘ownership society,’ the issue of intellectual property rights is something the […]

Ken Wiwa, son of a Nigerian political activist executed by the regime in 1995, recently wrote, “What Africa really needs more than ever are stories that contradict the prevailing and reductive narratives of the continent.” There are myriad realities in the many nations that make up the continent — les Afriques, as the French aptly […]

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil — On the opening night of the World Social Forum (WSF) last month, Gilberto Gil, musician-turned-Brazilian-cultural-minister, stood backstage, waiting patiently for his turn to play to the crowded exposition field. It was very much in the democratic and chaotic spirit of the occasion, which ran from January 26-31 (the fifth edition of […]

Set in Mexico, England, and culminating in Seattle during the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests of 1999, Robert Newman’s novel The Fountain at the Center of the World has already sold out its first printing in the United Kingdom (it has just been published in the United States). It’s easy to see why: Newman has […]