As the 2011 referendum approaches, can the Southern People's Liberation Movement convince politicians and army commanders who have defected from the movement that they have a future in a new nation?
Just months before Sudan's secession referendum, displaced southerners are being harassed for brewing a traditional drink called marissa.
NUUK, Greenland—The posters are plastered on school walls and at bus stops across Greenland's capital city. The message, aimed at teenagers, is a direct plea to use a special hot line: "The call is free. No one is alone. Don't be alone with your dark thoughts. Call."
If you know anything about Greenland, you know that it is the world's largest island. You know that it is the least densely populated country on the planet. You might even know that Richie Cunningham spent two seasons of Happy Days stationed here with the Army.
The photographs above correspond to Brook's three pieces published by Slate. The items labeled "Dispatch 1" are associated to his 9/08 piece, "Dispatch 2" to 9/09, and "Dispatch 3" to 9/10.
In 1994, Mohamed Atta traveled to Istanbul with a student group and continued onward to visit Dittmar Machule in northern Syria, where the professor was doing fieldwork on a Bronze Age village under excavation. But Atta found himself more interested in the traditional urbanism of the nearest major city, Aleppo. Atta was hardly the first student of Middle Eastern architecture drawn to Aleppo. Along with Fez in Morocco and Sana'a in Yemen, Aleppo is considered among the best-preserved cities in the Arab world.
Mohamed Atta became an architect at Cairo University, in the city where he came of age. The Egyptian capital is a fascinating, albeit poorly maintained, open-air museum, spanning 5,000 years of architectural history. In its recent past—since Napoleon's 1798 invasion, in Egypt's near-geologic time frame—the city has lurched from Western model to Western model, trying in vain to reclaim its lost glory. In the Abdin neighborhood where Atta grew up, grand Parisian apartment buildings constructed in the 19th century now sit caked in dust, their windows shattered.
A month after 9/11, Fouad Ajami wrote in the New York Times Magazine, "I almost know Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian [at] the controls of the jet that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center." While the Middle East scholar had never met the lead hijacker, Ajami knew his type: the young Arab male living abroad, tantalized by yet alienated from Western modernity, who retreats into fundamentalist piety.
Visit Slate to view related slideshow by David Rochkind
NOGALES, Mexico—Enrique Enriquez is a veteran of the battles fought along the border. As one of the local heads of the humanitarian immigration agency Grupos Beta, Enriquez has spent almost 15 years watching as the business of human smuggling morphed from a series of independent "mom and pop" shops into a big business.
At about 5:30 in the morning, I was idling at a stoplight and squinting to read the tiny print on my map when the white chap next to me rolled down the window of his beige Land Rover. Two Europeans were seated on the safari seats behind him with cameras already strapped to their necks. "Follow me!" he shouted.
"Going to—er—Pumbi?" I said, having no idea what the name meant much less which of the region's many tribal languages it came from: Xitsonga, siSwati, Sesotho, Tshivenda, isiZulu, Setswana …
When we first spotted Fender through the 8-foot-tall perimeter fence, I could see she was hobbling behind her two pals, Rory and Stellar. While most packs of African wild dogs consist of a dozen animals, the "diamond dogs" living on this DeBeers-owned reserve numbered just three.
Visit Slate to view related slideshow by David Rochkind
ALTAR, Mexico—I hadn't yet taken 10 steps off the bus when I made eye contact with someone for the first time.
"Are you going north?" he hissed, walking quickly toward me. "Let's go. Let's go," he implored.
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