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How Obama Won
Ian Leslie
‘Barack Obama is himself a mixture of these things: lecture theatre and church, Harvard and Chicago’s South Side.’
Polling in New York City
Owen Sheers
‘It’s been said more than once during this US presidential campaign that the rest of the world should be allowed a vote as well.’
Saved to Drafts
ZZ Packer
‘I know you’ll make the right choice; even if you don’t, you’re still beloved family.’
Beirut | Dispatches
Lana Asfour
‘I was determined that this latest crisis wouldn’t keep me out of the country of my birth.’
Anlong Veng | Dispatches
Elena Lesley
‘There are no words to say how angry I am. I want to know why they killed their own people. I want answers.’
Visual Thinking:
The flawed cartographer
Catherine O’Flynn
‘Sometime after the First Gulf War, I heard on the news that sixty-three per cent of young Americans could not identify Iraq on a map of the world.’ Catherine O'Flynn in Granta 103: The Rise of the British Jihad.
In Gikuyu, for Gikuyu, of Gikuyu
Binyavanga Wainaina
‘My first name, Binyavanga, has always been a sort of barometer of public mood.’
Dreams of Reason
Ruth Franklin
‘We know that nightmares are unreal, yet they torment us all the same.’
Zulu Romeo Foxtrot
Douglas Coupland
‘This inflexibility makes sense to a non-visual thinker, but to visual thinkers such dogma is depressing and sad, like forcing ballerinas to wear suits of armour.‘
Letter From Pondicherry, India
Akash Kapur
‘When I was growing up in Pondicherry, a former French colony on the south-east coast of India, I would go with my family each Sunday to the beach.‘
Subject+Object
You can taste the clay
Hilary Mantel
‘It is slate, heavier than it looks: dull brown in colour, a little longer and wider than the palm of my hand.‘
The Paris Intifada
Andrew Hussey
‘In the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire wrote of Paris being haunted by its past, by ‘ghosts in daylight.’
