Social Networks

from:

See all 68

The Outsiders: Afghanistan's Hazaras

The Hazaras cherish education and hard work, but their Shiite Muslim faith and Asian features have long made them a target. Will they find a better life in the post-Taliban era?

Phil Zabriskie in National Geographic:

At the heart of Afghanistan is an empty space, a striking absence, where the larger of the colossal Bamian Buddhas once stood. In March 2001 the Taliban fired rockets at the statues for days on end, then planted and detonated explosives inside them. The Buddhas had looked out over Bamian for some 1,500 years. Silk Road traders and missionaries of several faiths came and went. Emissaries of empires passed through—Mongols, Safavids, Moguls, British, Soviets—often leaving bloody footprints. A country called Afghanistan took shape. Regimes rose and collapsed or were overthrown. The statues stood through it all. But the Taliban saw the Buddhas simply as non-Islamic idols, heresies carved in stone. They did not mind being thought brutish. They did not fear further isolation. Destroying the statues was a pious assertion of their brand of faith over history and culture.

It was also a projection of power over the people living under the Buddhas' gaze: the Hazaras, residents of an isolated region in Afghanistan's central highlands known as Hazarajat—their heartland, if not entirely by choice. Accounting for up to one-fifth of Afghanistan's population, Hazaras have long been branded outsiders. They are largely Shiite Muslims in an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim country. They have a reputation for industriousness yet work the least desirable jobs. Their Asian features—narrow eyes, flat noses, broad cheeks—have set them apart in a de facto lower caste, reminded so often of their inferiority that some accept it as truth.

Read more

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner

Based on Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"

Tears in the Rain

Mohsen Namjoo -- ro sar beneh

The Oberlin Experiment

Reportage
The Oberlin Experiment
Why the failed revolution of Radical Athleticism may be the great unwritten chapter in American sports history.
By Anne Trubek


Oberlin College is a Division III school better known for incubating Ph.D.s than pro athletes. Athletic events attract a smattering of fans. The sports teams lose with astounding regularly. The last time the Yeomen made national news was when the football team ended a 44-game losing streak in 2001. Academically, athletes are, taken as a whole, the weakest group on campus, according to a study of athletics at selective schools. Many varsity athletes are outliers on campus; they are generally recruited from traditional jock cultures, and often feel alienated from the rest of a student body so clichéd as a bastion of queer, vegan, hipster progressivism that Gawker dubbed it the “most annoying liberal arts college in the country.”

I was a varsity athlete at Oberlin some 20 odd years ago. I can prove it to you by showing you the team photo on the walls of Philips Gymnasium. There I am, second row, third from left, varsity women’s soccer, 1984. I am a freshman, and my first year in college was also the first year there was women’s varsity soccer at Oberlin. I am proud of that fact, that bit of Title IX history. I am also proud that my teammates and I were not conventional jocks: We had somehow decided to play soccer, perhaps because we had lived in enclaves with lots of international residents or were just fast and coordinated and preferred kicking to spiking. Athletics were lower on the Oberlin ledger in those days; our coach was a philosophy professor. Some of us had never played the game before we joined the college team. We lived in co-ops and smoked pot and won more than we lost — we won, in fact, more than the .....Read more

Playlist 51

Happy New Year

W

---

e