Hello, and happy Friday! It’s been a busy couple of weeks, so I’m keeping the top of this correspondence brief.
But first, in broadcast news: I joined CNN’s Newsroom on Monday to discuss the no-confidence vote in Boris Johnson (spoiler: he survived) and Al Jazeera’s The Stream last night to discuss the U.S. government’s responsibility to Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh (more on that below).
What I’ve written
Tomorrow marks one month since the Palestinian American journalist and longtime Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh was killed while reporting on an Israeli military raid in the city of Jenin, in the occupied West Bank. I wrote about the U.S. government’s responsibility to investigate her killing and the message the Biden administration sends if it doesn’t.
The Biden administration still has the opportunity to determine definitively who killed Shireen Abu Akleh and turn her case into a deterrent for those who might otherwise have little compunction about murdering members of the press. Unless the U.S. is willing to act on its words about accountability and see that justice is served, it not only will have failed one of its own, but will also be sending out a dangerous message to the world that the lives of journalists, even American journalists, are expendable. Keep reading here
Last month, I went to London’s National Theatre to see The Father and the Assassin, a play about the man who killed Mahatma Gandhi. It was a gripping production, and it got me thinking about Nathuram Godse’s legacy and what his lionization—by some, at least—says about India today.
“You will always remain a footnote,” one of the prison guards goads Godse in the play, as he awaits trial for Gandhi’s murder. Footnote no more: The rehabilitation of Godse is now visible across the country in the form of statues, temples, and memorials. The Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which is governed by the BJP, even made a bid to rename the city of Meerut after Godse (though it ultimately failed). Keep reading here
What I’ve read
This week, the answer is lots and lots of profiles:
On Dianne Feinstein (The Cut)
As the storied career of one of the nation’s longest-serving Democrats approaches its end, it’s easy to wonder how the generation whose entry into politics was enabled by progressive reforms has allowed those victories to be taken away. And how a woman who began her career with the support of conservationist communities in San Francisco, and who staked her political identity on advancing women’s rights, is now best known to young people as the senator who scolded environmental-activist kids in her office in 2019 and embraced Lindsey Graham after the 2020 confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett, a Supreme Court justice who appears to be the fifth and final vote to end the constitutional right to an abortion. As Feinstein told Graham, “This is one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in.”
On Steve Bannon (The Atlantic)
White House reporters were fond of him. In a leaky White House, Bannon was a gusher. (And often with the dirtiest dish.) He’s quite capable of code-switching into the patois and patter of the coastal elite, probably because he’s a card-carrying member, whether he likes it or not: an alumnus of Harvard Business School, Georgetown School of Foreign Service, Goldman Sachs, Hollywood. But his actual beliefs are hard to discern. Michael Wolff’s entertaining anthology, Too Famous, includes an astute essay about Bannon, noting that he “could seem like a person both professing quite an extraordinary level of bullshit, and yet, as dramatically, not believing any of it at all.” He is Schrödinger’s bullshitter, at once of his nonsense and above it.
On Ursula von der Leyen (TIME)
Von der Leyen, who moves easily between English, German, and French, is very much a product of the postwar European order. But for a brief period, she was more likely to be found at a Soho pub or a punk concert than hobnobbing with the children of politicians. In 1978, with her father facing threats that she would be kidnapped, she adopted the pseudonym “Rose Ladson,” and went to study at the London School of Economics. “I lived far more than I studied,” she told German newspaper Die Zeit in 2016. Cosmopolitan London gave her “an inner freedom” that she still treasures—though she tells me her love of punk has now waned in favor of classical music and, most of all, Adele.
What I’m thinking about
These bowls:
Until next time,
Yasmeen