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 PAKISTAN’S OTHER INSURGENTSA Day in the Desert With Baloch GuerrillasThe departure point was in Pakistani Balochistan. Our hosts, a patrol of Baloch guerrillas, requested that we be no more specific than that.
The driver and his passenger had their faces wrapped tightly so that... | |
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 THE WARLORD OF THE HIGHWAYMatiullah Khan Is the Most Feared Crossing Guard in AfghanistanMatiullah Khan is the head of the Highway Police, a government agency that was officially dissolved several years ago by Dutch forces in the Uruzgan province of southern Afghanistan. According to Dutch officials stationed in the region, Matiullah is not a government official. The Dutch do not deal with him. They prefer not to mention his name—when they must, they refer to him as “M.” According to the Dutch troops... | |
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 A POSTCARD FROM WALESDear Mum and Dad, I’m Living In a Heroin EpidemicThe small South Wales city of Swansea is in the grip of a heroin epidemic. How do I know? Well, I’ve been living with a group of young Welsh heroin addicts, on and off, for the last three months. The needle exchange where they flock to every day to change their works recently reported that in the last four years there has been a 178 percent increase... | |
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 FOLLOW THE GPS, ÉSEThe Transborder Immigrant Tool Helps Mexicans Cross Over SafelyOver the past two decades, Ricardo Dominguez has been utilizing electronics and the internet to piss off just about every high-level administrative authority in the US. In the late 90s, his performance-art-cum-activist organization the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) set up a participatory website-jamming network called the FloodNet system, which allowed anyone with an internet connection... | |
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 TOTALITARIAN PLEASANTRIESI Shook Robert Mugabe’s Hand and Toured His Wife’s Dairy FarmI’d been on the road with Venerable Master Hui Li for two weeks. Li’s a Buddhist monk from Taiwan who has undertaken the task of building orphanages in each of Africa’s 53 bedeviled countries. My idea was to see what sort of grumpy despots crawled out from under their blood-covered boulders as Li went about his mission. And wouldn’t you know, it turned out that the Michael Jordan of the megalomaniacal-tyrant... | |
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 THE DESSERT PSYCHOPunk Drummer Transforms Into World-Class Chef With Alarming SwiftnessI’ve worked in just enough restaurants to recognize an abnormally large pastry station when I see one. It was January, and I was standing in the kitchen below Del Posto, one of New York’s—and thus the world’s—most prestigious restaurants. The spotless counter before me was at least a dozen feet long, and the region it... | |
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 DON’T SAY CHEESEThomas Ruff Is Not Interested in PhotographyThomas Ruff is one of Germany’s best living photographers. He has his roots in the type of sterile, objective photography that loves water towers, silos, and other vertical piles of industrial cement that somehow became a big part of German photography’s legacy. He did it better than most.
But then in the 80s Ruff starting shooting massive half-body portraits of... | |
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 A WHISKEY GLASS AND A WOMAN’S ASSMichael Abramson Is the Unsung Documentarian of South Side R&BBetween 1975 and 1977 some serious boogie-woogieing was happening in the disreputable nightclubs and dive bars on the South Side of Chicago. It was a remarkable time, when the dance floors were slick with bodily fluids and enshrouded in smoke from Kools as patrons cut loose to the city’s unmistakable brand of soul. And if it... | |
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 LIBERIAN GIRLS AND BOYSHave Better Vintage T-shirts Than YouVBS.TV recently visited Monrovia, Liberia, where we made a film with three former warlords called General Bin Laden, General Rambo and General Butt Naked... | |
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