Adam Shatz is the LRB’s US editor. He is the author of Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, which includes many pieces from the paper, and The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. He has written for the LRB on subjects including the war in Gaza, Fanon, France’s war in Algeria, mass incarceration in America and Deleuze and Guattari. His LRB podcast series, Human Conditions, considers revolutionary thought in the 20th century through conversations with Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards. Sign up here.
At a recent event at the National Gallery in Washington, the painter Oliver Lee Jackson recalled hearing Charlie Parker and Max Roach play at nightclubs in the 1950s. Jackson, who was born in 1935, grew up during the Bebop revolution, and the kinetic language of his canvases echoes the freedom and spontaneity of jazz performance. But what most impressed him about the musicians he loved were...
Trump isn’t about to go to Tehran, not yet. For now, he is content to attack Iran inside Iraq, just as Iran is content to attack American interests in Iraq. (Seventeen years after the invasion, Iraq remains a theatre of war between its not-so-former occupier and its most powerful neighbour.) But those who imagined that Trump would oversee an American retreat from the Middle East should have been disabused of that illusion. While he ran on a promise to end America’s wars, he now seems determined to keep troops in Iraq, especially after the Iraqi parliament responded to Soleimani’s assassination by asking American forces to leave. Soleimani paid with his life for insulting Trump. ‘There is not one night we sleep without thinking of you,’ Soleimani said in July 2018 on Iranian television.
Lebanon has a history of taking in refugees: Armenian survivors of the genocide, Palestinians driven from their homes in 1948, Syrians fleeing the horrors of Assad and Islamic State. But on 30 December a different kind of fugitive arrived, a wealthy native son facing charges of financial wrongdoing abroad. At a press conference this afternoon, Carlos Ghosn protested his innocence and compared his arrest in Japan to the attack on Pearl Harbor. He wouldn’t say how he escaped (according to one of the more fanciful rumours, he was hidden in a musical instrument case). He entered Lebanon on his French passport, one of three he carries.
By killing Soleimani, Trump has not only supplied the Islamic Republic with a powerful casus belli, he has also reinforced its longstanding narrative of martyrdom at the hands of the Great Satan, and may well help to strengthen the supreme leader’s hand at the very moment that the regime is facing popular anti-Iranian protests in Iraq and Lebanon, and reeling from a series of revolts at home in which hundreds of Iranians were killed by security forces. Not for the first time, the American government has proved an objective ally of Iran’s hardliners.
David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel, was brooding, explosive, often on the verge of collapse: every obstacle he faced was a ‘catastrophe’. He dabbled in mysticism, consulted fortune-tellers, claimed to see flying saucers, and lived according to his whims. At one point he went on an unannounced holiday from his duties as prime minister to take driving lessons...
Adam Shatz is joined by Muhammad Shehada and Jehad Abusalim to discuss the ongoing crisis on the ground in Gaza, the economic and political vision of the Board of Peace, and the role of the National Committee...
Adam Shatz is joined by Joëlle Abi-Rached and Mohamad Bazzi to discuss life on the ground in Lebanon, Israel’s strategic objectives in the region and Hizbullah’s relationship to the the...
Iran’s supreme leader recently claimed victory, simply by reason of survival, in the war launched by Israel on 13 June, and joined a week later by the United States. With the twelve-day conflict...
Adam Shatz is joined by Loubna Mrie and Omar Dahi to discuss the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the future of the country.
Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Muhammad Shehada join Adam Shatz to describe what life was like in Gaza in the months and years leading up to the Hamas attack on Israel last October, and to discuss the...
In his third conversation looking at the crisis in the Middle East, Adam talks to Mohamad Bazzi about Israel’s expansion of its war into Lebanon and the recent assassinations of Yahya Sinwar and...
In the first of three episodes on the crisis in the Middle East, Adam Shatz is joined by Mairav Zonszein and Amjad Iraqi to discuss the experiences of Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel. ...
Enzo Traverso talks to Adam Shatz about his new book on the history of revolutionary passions, images and ideas, from the rebellion of self-liberated slaves in Haiti in 1791 to Stalin’s top-down...
Claire Denis and J. Hoberman join Adam Shatz to talk about the work and legacy of Jean-Luc Godard.
Adam Shatz, the LRB’s US editor, talks to Sindre Bangstad and Reza Zia-Ebrahimi about the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, from its origins in the high tide of French colonial expansionism...
Fanon’s world has a logic. His pages are full of identities, contradictions, Aufhebungen – master and slave, being and nothingness. Any biography, however, has to decide in the end which...
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