Remembering the grand movie houses of old Libya
Today, the sole major cinema left in Tripoli is a men-only zone stripped of glamour, offering a diet of violence-packed films and blunt warnings that women are not welcome.
And the city's old epithet, "Mermaid of the Mediterranean", jars sharply with what has become a mainly Islamist-run capital of a country plagued by conflict and political chaos.
The rot started even before the 2011 revolution that ousted longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi, and has since seen movie houses bolt their doors one after the other.
Continue reading on Your Middle East
To share or not to share images of drowned refugees
As useful as social media is in instantaneously disseminating information and fostering unprecedented levels of connectedness between people, organizations, and institutions, we sometimes forget it can operate in truly bizarre, mechanistic ways. Which, of course, makes sense. Fueled by algorithms, servers, and networks – things built by humans but lacking (as technology, by definition, does) in humanness, social media is a bad place to look for the nuances and subtleties of human emotion. But, when images of death and destruction are placed on an equal plane, allotted the same space and visibility as the latest celebrity gossip or cute animal video, it is worth taking pause.
Continue reading on Muftah
Stunning Arabic light calligraphy by Julien Breton
Artist Julien Breton aka ‘Kaalam‘ is a master of photographic light painting, turning full-body gestures reminiscent of dance movements into the invisible pen strokes of Arabic calligraphy. Breton works silently in secluded urban environments and against dimmed architectural backdrops to execute perfectly rehearsed motions that translate on film to both abstract and literal Arabic handwriting. With its sweeping tails, loops, and punctuated diacritic dots, it’s difficult to imagine any other language more suited to the transcription of human body movement into written language.
Continue reading on Colossal
