The Atlantic on the US' reluctance to negotiate with its enemies. "American moral righteousness can make the act of bargaining seem inherently suspect."
openDemocracy on why IS is destroying cultural artefacts in the territory it conquers.
Saudi Arabia is employing air strikes in Yemen to battle the advance of Shiite Houthi rebels.
The US is going to delay its troop pullout from Afghanistan to retain its counter-terrorism efforts, including using Afghanistan as a base for drone operations.
The European Union, following an Italian proposal, is considering outsourcing its patrols of the Mediterranean to non-EU countries, as well as establishing "reception centres" outside of its territory to process asylum requests (“This would produce a real deterrent effect, so that fewer and fewer migrants would be ready to put their life at risk to reach the European coasts"). Australia already does the latter - here's a shocking report on what is happening in the Nauru detention centre.
Teju Cole on photography and the conflict in the Ukraine:
Conflict photography comes with built-in risks for the photographers, who put themselves in harm’s way to bring us news, but also, in a less visceral way, for us, the viewers. If it is done well, it can move us to think of art and pop culture (“it’s just like a movie”), instead of the suffering it depicts. If it is not done well, if the images are not formally compelling, it might lose its claim on even our momentary attention.
The New York Times Magazine: Object Lesson, March 17, 2015CityMag on the future economy of South Australia.
The cost of urban sprawl.
Pop Culture:
The X-Files and with it literary scholar David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson will return for a limited six-ep run, proving that the Nineties are coming back in the most unexpected ways. (Also, Pretty Little Liars' fifth season finale last night truly proved that it basically is the Twin Peaks' of this decade, begging the question of what that reboot is going to look like in comparison. It's gone off the rails, everything's possible!).
An interview with Hilary Mantel in the Paris Review (on changing facts for the sake of drama):
I would never do that. I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don’t see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction. I suppose if I have a maxim, it is that there isn’t any necessary conflict between good history and good drama. I know that history is not shapely, and I know the truth is often inconvenient and incoherent. It contains all sorts of superfluities. You could cut a much better shape if you were God, but as it is, I think the whole fascination and the skill is in working with those incoherences.
The Paris Review. Hilary Mantel, Art of Fiction No. 226, March 2015Here are all the discussions and readings from the Adelaide Writers' Week 2015.