Raging bull. Aspiring dictator. Insult comic. Donald Trump has and will always be an impossible subject for the media to cover. With democracy (and the free press) now on the line, what if we embraced the show?
Author: Jeff Israely
Jeff Israely is Worldcrunch co-founder and editor-in-chief. Previously, he was a TIME magazine bureau chief in Paris and Rome.
What’s the difference between a nation before a voting booth and a nation before a soccer match? How can we reconcile electoral systems that don’t seem to match the popular will? How do we remember that democracy is about more than just casting your vote?
This wasn’t supposed to be about politics or identity or anti-Semitism, about war or peace. It’s a story about a name. What’s in a name? Nothing at all, says Mr. Shakespeare. Or maybe all of the above when the name is Israely and the year was 2023.
Worldcrunch’s editor tries to make some kind of sense out of a week that felt senseless and tragic, perilous and inevitable all at once.
Two years on, even if they’ve still not given us the definitive answers to COVID-19, scientists are our best hope. But they can’t do it alone.
Like the rest of us, street hustlers are adjusting to pandemic conditions. In Laval, a small city in western France, a young man who might have otherwise been taking passersby for a ride with Three-Card Monte or Find The Lady tricks, concocted a COVID-inspired scam for easy money. The Ouest France daily reports that the […]
Worldcrunch’s editor reflects on how we lived through – and covered – a year that we might have known was coming.
-Analysis- PARIS — It was the kind of headline that risks fading into your news feed as if it were barely news: “Ivory Coast: As Presidential Election Approaches, International Criminal Court Worries About Violence,” Jeune Afrique magazine announced last week. And so it followed, as votes were cast this past weekend in President Alassane Ouattara’s […]
Ahead of the Nov. 3 election, this is an October Surprise that has four full weeks to play out.
-Essay- PARIS — I do my best not to get pulled into the rabbit hole of U.S. election coverage. It’s hard to imagine, at this point, how any poll or tweet or scandal could possibly affect the outcome. Can our global news site really find a new angle to help explain Donald Trump? Can anyone? […]
PARIS — Grandioso, say the Italians. Kolossalt for the Swedes. The Berkeley student newspaper called it monumental, while a Buenos Aires daily was stamping it patrimonio de la humanidad. The world’s popular music critics and other sundry writer types (wink!) have spent the past few weeks trying to size up something that is much more […]
By now, our regular readers know that Worldcrunch works hard at being of and for and about no one particular place or people or subject matter. Our beat and our audience are written in our name, and we work with journalists and newspapers everywhere to tell the stories (no matter how big or small) that […]
PARIS — There’s a price to be paid, in euros and other things, when you choose to live in a city like Paris. But there’s a reason people pay: There’s only one Louvre, one Opera Garnier and exactly 114 Michelin-star restaurants. And even if you don’t have tickets, or the euros, to make it through […]
Charles de Gaulle was the first world leader to truly understand the power of television, using regular presidential broadcasts as a way to circumvent French legislators, labor unions and other levers of democratic influence.
For most of human history, the best way to protect personal privacy was to simply stay at home. Lock yourself in your room, or the proverbial closet, and nobody can find out a thing. In little more than a decade, those walls and doors have vanished as digital technology invites us to take large chunks […]
-Analysis- PARIS — Remember conspiracy theories? There was a time, not so long ago, when we used to worry about how the internet encourages the proliferation of crackpot versions of what “really happened” on 9/11 or circulated “the ultimate proof” that Moon landings were actually staged in a television studio. Nowadays, a website hocking a […]
-Analysis- There is style, and there is taste. There is also politics. The “style” in question here is the sort that is so often the source of bloody combat in the publishing world: whether to capitalize the Pope (pope), how to spell “okay” (OK?) and any number of sordid battles over the English language and […]
PARIS — As the editor of what we call a “digital magazine,” I must make lots of choices on any given day as the various streams of news — real and fake and often just pointless — criss-cross on my computer and smartphone screens. Save this, swipe that, assign this, ignore that. Just one of […]
NEW YORK — If you’re a middle-class American baby boomer or Gen Xer, you might have spent much of the past decade wondering what went wrong. If you’re a boomer, there’s a good chance you’re still working well after you thought you’d retire. And if you’re part of Generation X, you’re probably less wealthy than your parents were at the same age. Meanwhile, all across the U.S., pension funds are underfunded and will almost certainly have to default on some of their obligations to retirees. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, middle-class […]
WASHINGTON — For Donald Trump, little is more intoxicating and affirming of his own power than creating tornadoes and watching them tear across the landscape. In the space of just 24 hours this week, the president-elect set off cyclones near and far that preview the drama he seems likely to bring to the White House. Trump summoned two dozen television executives and news anchors to his offices Monday to berate them as dishonest and disobedient. He sought to strong-arm the British government into appointing his Brexit ally, Nigel Farage, as ambassador to the United States. He dropped his threat to […]
ST LOUIS — I’m the guy who never answered the phone when caller ID said “Number Unavailable.” I don’t want every opinion, every perspective, and every trend to be visible to those who would mold public opinion. I am suspicious that had the power brokers in Washington known what was coming, they’d have found a way to get Hillary Clinton into office. I didn’t want that. I’m fed up. Enough is enough. I want my country back. This is supposed to be a government of the people — not of the banks, lobbyists and foreign donors. I am one of […]
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump will face wide-ranging questions about his ethics and integrity from the moment he enters the White House in January. The president-elect says he’ll turn over his vast financial holdings to his kids. But many doubt a blind trust will insulate him completely, potentially exposing him to conflicts of interest or the appearance of such conflicts on a range of domestic and foreign issues as no president before. During the campaign, Trump branded his opponents with nicknames such as “Lyin Ted” and “Crooked Hillary.” Yet more than Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton, he lied and shrewdly assumed […]
In a normal election season, the signs would seem to point toward a Hillary Clinton victory. This is not normal.
-Analysis- WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is not really running a campaign for president anymore. Instead, he is involved in an extended revenge plot or is simply following the politics of grievance to its natural, unseemly end. See, campaigns have a message. They have strategy and tactics. They show restraint and coordination. Trump, in the 10 days since the release of a hot-mic tape of him making lewd and sexually suggestive comments about women, has done none of those things. Literally none. The Washington Post”s Jose Del Real counted more than 20 different messages from Trump during a five-minute span of […]
KATARAGAMA — A full moon is shining over the traditional Pooja celebrations here in southwest Sri Lanka. By the light of candles, people offer flowers, fruit and incense. Above waves the Sri Lankan flag, with a leaf in each of its corners to represent the four religions on the island nation: Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. But this idyllic setting in Kataragama is deceiving. The peaceful coexistence between religions in the country came crashing down last June 15 when hundreds of anti-Muslim Buddhists, led by a dozen monks from the extremist organization Bodu Bala Sena, stormed into Dharga Town, a […]
Why do so many Filipinos own and carry weapons? One theory points to the influence of former American colonial rulers.
Once a backer of the Free Syrian Army, a harsh reality caught up with this father of three near Aleppo.
DAMASCUS — Maher knows more about trash than a nine-year-old should know. “Some of it stinks more than others,” he says, chuckling at his own remarks. “At first I used to feel like I was about to faint before I finished my job, but I got used to it.” It’s not unusual in different areas in and around Damascus to see children and sometimes older men or women climbing into garbage cans, foraging for scraps of food. Passersby often turn their faces away from the scene. The young children who collect goods from the garbage can are often insulted or […]
More than two million Syrian children have lost all access to education. In western Syria, one principal is looking to change things.
Many Syrian children are forced to leave school and work as child laborers for employers who ofter mistreat them. New statistics shows a 30% drop in school attendance since the war began.
ALEPPO – It’s been three months since the Syrian government launched its offensive on this city’s opposition neighborhoods, using barrels packed with explosives. After a two-week lull during harsh winter weather, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have reportedly resumed – and even increased the intensity – of the raids. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports that more than 400 people have been killed in the country’s largest city by these makeshift “barrel bombs” since the beginning of February, even as Geneva II peace talks were under way. Most rebel-held areas in Aleppo have turned into a no-man’s land as residents […]
KARACHI – Begging and sex work are what transgender people in Pakistan too often end up doing. But this also means that they are more likely to have information about the dark world of child sex trafficking. Bindya Rana had the idea of tapping into this connection to find missing children. “We are provided with pictures of the missing child, which we pass on to the transgender people in the areas where they beg and live,” Rana explains, noting that some 2,000 transgender are on the case. “We direct them to search, and if they get any information to let […]
ALEPPO — The toll in what was once Syria’s thriving capital of commerce is also being measured by low temperatures and record snowfall. Activists say the people of Aleppo risk dying every day in unheated homes. The Syrian Network for Human Rights said that no fewer than 22 people died in Syria last week, including nine children, from sub-zero temperatures as lengthy power shortages were recorded. In Aleppo, once the country’s economic capital, electricity has been scarce since continued shelling took out power lines. The exorbitant prices of oil and diesel fuel, and even wood, prevented many from being able […]
IDLIB – On my trip to northern Syria a week ago, I asked my hosts lots of questions. Will the Syrian regime be able to recapture the liberated areas inside Syria? Are you better off with the regime returning to your area, or with the rule of the others, including those run by civilians, the Free Syrian Army or the al-Qaida-backed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)? After all, many changes had taken place since my last visit in early July. The elected president of Egypt, a patron of Syrian refugees in that country, was removed from power by […]
In the northern city of Raqqa, the condemned — some civilians, some soldiers, shabiha or alleged Assad collaborators — are brought blindfolded and handcuffed to the city square to be shot in the head in public. Once celebrated as one of Syria’s first fully liberated cities, Raqqa, now under the control of the al-Qaida backed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), has become infamous for brutal public executions and other fear tactics carried out by extremists. The executions are carried out swiftly and without legal counsel. Asyad al-Mousa, a 34-year-old lawyer, is dedicated to documenting the mounting number […]
The popular TV dramas were once considered a reflection of the Syrian President’s will for reform. Things have changed since the uprising in 2011, even if the shows must go on.