Ibn Ibn Battuta

Venice Moments, at Just the Right Time

2022-04-08T07:54:00.005-04:00

A Venetian flag flutters over one of the canals that remain the city's primary arteries.

Given how widely I've been fortunate to travel, it takes a lot to shock me. But the view as we emerged from the Venice train station, squinting in the afternoon sun, really stopped me in my tracks: beyond a small plaza lay the sparkling emerald water of the Grand Canal, crisscrossed by gondolas, water taxis, and pleasure craft—just as I'd always imagined it, yes, but very much alive.

Or maybe I had just forgotten how it feels to travel. By the time Nina, Stella, and I visited Venice back in September, it had been nearly two years since our last proper vacation. After a few days in South Tyrol (the rugged slice of northern Italy that is largely Germanic in language and culture) we spent four nights in Venice. It was a chance to finally discover a place we had both longed to visit but—put off by horror stories of overcrowding—had never dared to.

Amid perfect late summer weather, we spent our days meandering through the city, gelato in hand and Stella in the backpack. We took a sunset gondola ride, snapped a thousand photos, and toured the Basilica di San Marco and Doge's Palace. (The latter is a fascinating relic of Venice's opulence during its heyday as the capital of a sprawling maritime empire and an enlightened hub of commerce and the arts.) We discovered a favorite restaurant, Al Vecio Portal, with astounding seafoods and pastas served in a secluded garden—where little Stella charmed the waiters and fellow patrons several evenings in a row.

Absent the usual crowds, waiters in St. Mark's Square idled.

I've visited Amsterdam, Annecy, and several other cities-with-canals that are sometimes dubbed "the Venice of" their respective lands. But none of these rely on canals as much as Venice, where the waterways are both far more numerous and far more central to the city's daily life than I had anticipated. They aren't merely for the tourists' benefit; in the absence of cars, they remain Venice's principal arteries for moving goods and people, not unlike when they were constructed centuries ago.

It was only in Venice that I discovered that the gondoliers rowed, not poled, their way along the canals, though the waterways are indeed shallow. Our gondolier assured me I could stand comfortably in most of the smaller channels, depending on the tides.

I opted not to test the theory, even if the water was far cleaner than I had expected—impressively so, given the thousands of residents and visitors all around. We hardly ever saw trash floating in the canals (a fact that seems commendable to a guy who's lived in the places I have).

The city's built infrastructure was also well maintained. For years before visiting, and in our research before our trip, Nina and I encountered claims that the city was falling into ruin. ("Venice is crumbling!") But in our eyes, the buildings, streets, and elegant bridges arcing over the canals were in marvelous shape. "Uh, have you seen the Casbah of Algiers?" one of us would mutter each time we heard such laments about Venice.

Baby's first gondola ride

For two people most at home in the world's less hospitable, more off-the-beaten-track destinations, it would have been impossible to enjoy Venice under normal conditions; we picked our moment right. As it turned out, September fell just between the Delta and Omicrons waves of the Covid pandemic, allowing us to travel safely while still experiencing the city as it hasn't looked in years—reasonably peopled, not totally overrun with tourists.

For years, Venice has literally been sinking under the weight of its tourism industry—which grew to attract about 20 million people annually to a core area of just 2 square miles / 6 square kilometers. On bad days, some choke points would grow so congested that police had to establish "one-way pedestrian zones." Massive cruise ships would flood the city with day-trippers but also bring heavy waves and pollution that accelerated the city's slide into the surrounding lagoon. As seas have risen, Venice has sunk by nearly a foot in the last century. Also disconcertingly, the ancient city has seen its population shrink by more than two thirds since the 1950s, hollowing out its soul to make room for more Airbnbs.

Given this pre-pandemic state of affairs, when Covid decimated Venice's tourism industry many locals welcomed the chance to both breathe and rethink the city's approach. Officials are introducing new measures to regulate visitor flows, attract more overnight travelers rather than frenetic day-trippers, and more. They've even launched a new program ("Venywhere") to encourage digital nomads to settle in the city.

Grand Canal, viewed from the Ponte dell'Accademia

Traveling amid the pandemic, we easily found a faded hotel just behind St. Mark's Square (and for a steep discount). The famous square itself was sprinkled with small clusters of visitors, and the streets were comfortable to walk in, far from empty but really only busy in the very heart of the old city, around the Rialto Bridge. (That was also the only place we encountered Nina's nemeses: Instagram princesses, trailed by obedient boyfriends.)

Our favorite day of our trip was one we spent far from there, on the city's northern fringes, where real Venetians, not tourists, filled the streets. After the school day, parents and grandparents sat on benches, chatting and watching their kids play. A girl celebrated her sixth birthday party with friends on folding chairs and tables in the corner of one small square. In another, a gaggle of kids played soccer until an errant shot left their ball wedged between a saint's statue and the church wall it adorned. Judging from their reactions, it didn't seem like the first time.

The feel of those simple moments are what travel is all about. It can sound strange, even hypocritical, for a tourist to lament overtourism, but if more of us are ever to experience those beautiful moments, to glimpse those flickers of the familiar in foreign lands, then we need to spread out, varying our timing and ranging far beyond the most-pinned, most-favorited, most-upvoted hotspots. As always, we are both our own greatest joy and own worst enemy.

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Daily life in a quiet alley of central Venice

Reverberations of the Ukraine Crisis

2022-03-09T05:19:00.004-05:00

For Ukraine, Russia's ongoing invasion presents an existential crisis unseen in generations. It may yet prove to be so for the rest of us, too. Already, it looks likely to be a watershed geopolitical moment, on the order of the fall of the Berlin Wall or September 11.

Consequently, I have spent much of the past few weeks watching events there closely and trying to understand the implications. As part of that exercise, last week I published an analysis at Democracy in Exile, the journal of Democracy in the Arab World Now. (For those who don't know it, DAWN is the organization founded by Saudi journalist and rights activist Jamal Khashoggi before his assassination.)

Expanding on a piece I wrote last month for the Atlantic Council, the analysis explores Algeria's diplomatic positioning as well as how this new geopolitical crisis could impact the country's future. In short, it's all about the long game:

"For all the complex calculus it has imposed on Algerian diplomats, the implications of the Ukraine crisis for Algeria's immediate economic outlook have been more clearly positive. However, this rosy initial picture may grow more mixed in the months ahead."

Read the full analysis here: "Russia's War in Ukraine Will Relieve the Pressure on Algeria's Leaders—for Now" or in Arabic here: "حرب روسيا في أوكرانيا ستخفف الضغط على القادة الجزائريين في الوقت الحالي." As always, your feedback is welcome.

Three Years After the Hirak Began, Could War in Europe Extinguish Hope for Algeria’s Popular Movement?

2022-02-17T09:46:00.005-05:00

Algerians gather in central Algiers during a Hirak protest, July 2019

With international attention concentrated for weeks on Russian forces amassed at Ukraine’s borders, fewer resources have been spent anticipating the many second- and third-order effects that conflict between these two countries could trigger worldwide.
In light of its recent history, Algeria is one country whose fate could swing substantially based on Russia’s actions in eastern Europe.

Those are the opening lines of my latest analysis for the Atlantic Council, in which I explore how the looming possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine could impact Algerians' campaign for reform and accountable government.

Launched three years ago, in February 2019, Algeria's popular movement, the Hirak, toppled longtime President Bouteflika and his government, but fell short of forging more systemic change. Marches were paused for Covid, then restarted a year ago.

The renewed protests were met with heavy repression. Activists, journalists, civic leaders, and ordinary citizens have faced imprisonment on vague charges, enabled by dubious legal changes and a rigged justice system. Amid this crackdown, the Hirak has gone dormant (though the frustrations that fueled it remain very much alive).

Meanwhile, rising odds of conflict in Ukraine have pushed international oil and gas prices higher. Flush with revenue, Algeria's government is canceling taxes and boosting spending. If Russia invades, triggering sanctions from NATO countries, Algeria may appear newly indispensable to Europe.

To be sure, an influx of oil and gas revenue to Algeria could do much good—if put to service of citizens. But it shouldn't be allowed to reduce pressure on authorities to pursue reforms and uphold their commitments to freedom of expression and other human rights.

While still respecting Algeria's sovereignty, there is much that foreign partners can (and must) do to support reformers and ensure respect for human rights. In the article, I propose some of the many possible ways.

Read it in full on the Atlantic Council's MENA Source blog: Algeria’s fate is tied to the Ukraine crisis. Will a war extinguish hope for the country’s popular movement?

The Year in Review: 2021

2022-01-07T17:00:01.043-05:00

New arrivals in 2021: Stella and The Algerian Dream

Strange though it seems, there's no getting around it: Amid a challenging year for the planet and the human race, Nina and I had an unforgettably good year in 2021, marked by just as much transition as our turbulent 2020.

Here's a look back at some major milestones for us and the wider world, some of my favorite media from the year, and a look ahead to 2022.

I. Life

When the year began, Nina was pregnant with our first child and I was entering the final stages of writing my first book; the culmination of two very special life projects felt imminent—though one would prove to be much more a beginning than an end.

Stella's birth was joyful and surreal; watching her grow and learn over the ensuing months has been no less so. Her arrival upended every aspect of our lives, putting to the test all the talents of adaptation we had honed through years of living in foreign lands. Nina has embraced motherhood with grace and confidence. Though still bewildering, fatherhood has grown more familiar—and more fun—with each passing day. I'm thrilled to see what lies ahead.

2021 was the first year in a decade that I didn't set foot in Algeria, though the place, the people, and their ever-unfolding story remained present most notably in the form of The Algerian Dream. After months of lonely drafting and painful editing—aided immeasurably by a cadre of loyal and brilliant friends, to whom I am forever indebted—I published the book in September as a sort of capstone to my years in the country. The book earned me a mention from the New Yorker, interviews in Algerian media, praise from renowned economist Tyler Cowen, invitations to numerous book clubs and signings and webinars, podcast appearances and a French TV interview, and a glowing review in the prestigious Journal of North African Studies. It also helped me land a new post as senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, where I continue to share analyses on Algeria with the wider world.

As if the whirlwind of diaper changes and late-night feedings, editorial decisions and media attention weren't enough to give me grey hair (spoiler alert: it was, and it did), in 2021 I also began—and have nearly completed—an executive master's program in "information and knowledge systems management" at the Sorbonne in Paris. Attending class for several days each month required long train rides and frequent testing (read: regularly inviting pharmacists to rummage for Covid deep in my nasal passages), but also offered regular breaks from German village life. And the program was eye-opening—as much about the French worldview as about the academic content itself.

Once we were both vaccinated, Nina and I towed little Stella to the Dolomites and Venice for our year's only vacation—a luxury in times like these. (More on that trip coming soon.) Apart from those trips and a brief visit to the US for book distribution, I otherwise stayed close to our home-for-now, a historic farmhouse in the German countryside, where walking the dogs through the surrounding fields and forest is about as exciting as it gets. (Also to stave off boredom, I made the highly questionable decision to restart my lacrosse career at age 36 by joining the Kassel Raccoons.)

Finally, this year I adopted Obsidian, a "personal knowledge management" platform that is now my mental base of operations, the center of my little intellectual universe. The program has already begun shaping how I collect, digest, and process the cascade of information that fills my days.

II. Current Events

Despite the historically swift rollout of life-saving vaccines, 2021 was not the year the pandemic ended, as we had all hoped, first because our toxic media ecosystem led so many with access to vaccines to refuse them. (Result: In the US, Covid claimed more American lives this year than last.) Second, by failing to cooperate and invest in expanding vaccination worldwide, humanity earned itself several nasty new Covid variants, effectively ensuring the pandemic will remain with us in some form forever.

Around the world, the news offered a steady stream of other manmade catastrophes, from Israel's horrific bombardment of Gaza to Ethiopia's descent into civil war, Lebanon's slow-motion meltdown, and one climate-change-induced disaster after another. Back home, the January 6 attack on the US Capitol—part of a wider coup attempt by a sitting president—marked a historic low for my homeland, albeit one that many Americans remain committed to outdoing. The effortless slide back into pre-Trump deadlock and fecklessness in Washington, plus the disastrous collapse of whatever we had been propping up in Afghanistan, did little to inspire optimism.

There were bright spots, of course. The mRNA technology behind the Covid vaccines seems likely to lead to incredible advances against malaria, AIDS, and other scourges. And NASA's Perseverance Mars rover landing and James Webb Telescope launch (both of which we watched live in wonder this year) did much to remind us that human progress continues.

Life wasn't all roses before our present era, of course. But looking back on 2021, it's impossible to deny that our present-day collisions of traditional and social media, collective responsibility and individual ambition, new technologies and ingrained psychology are systemically hindering our societies from solving great challenges at a time we can ill afford such dysfunction. Our species' greatest challenge—climate change—is not on the horizon, it is upon us.

Pessimistic as all this might sound, I still believe our best days may still lay ahead.

III. Media & Influences

Child-rearing and a hefty stack of grad-school textbooks left me with far less free time than I would have liked this year, but I still found plenty to feed my curiosity in 2021. Here is a selection of favorite media I found influential and interesting throughout the year:

Essays

Three great satire pieces felt particularly relevant to me this year:

"Twelve Writing Prompts to Help You Finally Quit Writing" by Nick DiMaso (McSweeney's, February 8)
"Things That Are Different in Europe" by Sarah Hutto (New Yorker, January 25)
"Oh My Fucking God, Get the Fucking Vaccine Already, You Fucking Fucks" by Wendy Molyneux (McSweeney's, September 2)

This one wasn't satire, but was perhaps even funnier:

"Yahoo Answers, a Haven for the Confused, Is Shutting Down" by Daniel Victor (New York Times, April 6) "Why do people with baguettes think they are better than me? ... What does a hug feel like? ... How many calories are there in soap? ... What do Canadians download? ... Are you aware that we’re the laughingstock of the Internet?"

On social media:

"On the Internet, We’re Always Famous" by Chris Hayes (New Yorker, September 24) "Everyone is losing their minds online because the combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting the people we know to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways."

On medicine:

"The Secret Life of a Coronavirus" by Carl Zimmer (New York Times, February 26) "There are more viruses in a liter of seawater than there are human beings on the entire planet."
"All Placebos Are Not Created Equal" by Sam Atis (Substack, November 16) Even at the center of our medical system, there is so much we still don't understand.
"When a Virus Is the Cure" by Nicola Twilley (New Yorker, December 14 2020) "Scientists estimate that phages cause a trillion trillion infections per second, destroying half the world’s bacteria every forty-eight hours. As we are now all too aware, animal-specific viruses can mutate enough to infect a different animal species. But they will not attack bacteria, and bacteriophage viruses are similarly harmless to animals, humans included. Phage therapy operates on the principle that the enemy of our enemy could be our friend."
"Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?" by Gideon Lewis-Kraus (New Yorker, September 6) The article that left me most unsettled this year.

On climate:

"I've Hit My Climate Tipping Point" by Helen Lewis (The Atlantic, August 9) "Understanding a problem intellectually is not the same as feeling its presence in your daily life. ... 'Environmentalism' sounded woolly and tree-hugging... 'Climate change' sounded antiseptic and bloodless. 'Look at that 50-foot wall of fire' might just do the trick."
"The moral case for destroying fossil fuel infrastructure" by Andreas Malm (The Guardian, November 18) "If someone has planted a time bomb in your home, you are entitled to dismantle it. The same applies to our planet."

On authoritarianism and resistance:

"Vladimir the Poisoner of Underpants" by Aleksei Navalny (New York Times, February 3) "He’s never participated in any debates or campaigned in an election. Murder is the only way he knows how to fight. … He’ll go down in history as nothing but a poisoner."
"Surviving the Crackdown in Xinjiang" by Raffi Khatchadourian (New Yorker, April 5) An inside look at the horrors of China's ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs.

On places in decline:

"Afghanistan Meant Nothing" by Laura Jedeed (Medium, August 15) "I am Team Get The Fuck Out Of Afghanistan which, as a friend pointed out to me today, has always been Team Taliban. It’s Team Taliban or Team Stay Forever. There is no third team."
"The Other Afghan Women" by Anand Gopal (New Yorker, September 6)
"Lebanon as We Once Knew It Is Gone" by Lina Mounzer (New York Times, September 3) “Lebanon is not an exception. It is a preview of what happens when people run out of resources they believe are infinite. This is how fast a society can collapse. This is what it looks like when the world as we know it ends.”

And finally, a reflection on the big picture, and our ability to solve big problems:

"What if the Coronavirus Crisis Is Just a Trial Run?" by Adam Tooze (New York Times, September 1) "The world’s decision makers have given us a staggering demonstration of their collective inability to grasp what it would actually mean to govern the deeply globalized and interconnected world they have created."

Books

Back in spring, when 2021 was still shaping up to be the year the pandemic ended, I worked up the courage to read a pandemic-themed book, Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 bestseller Station Eleven. It was my favorite of the year, with a gripping story and some timely perspective: bad as it is, our own pandemic could be a lot worse.

Podcasts

"Winds of Change", Patrick Radden Keefe's investigation into whether an internationally beloved 1980s power-band were in fact secret agents who helped end the Cold War, was not merely the year's best podcast, but also the most entertaining bit of journalism I've encountered in recent memory.

In "Day X", NYT Berlin bureau chief Katrin Bennhold laid bare her dogged reporting on the shocking extent of far-right extremism in Germany's armed forces. Coming from a country that knows well where this road can lead (and nonetheless looks barely to be keeping up), it's the sort of cautionary tale that defenders of liberal democracy the world over should heed.

Apart from those limited series, I also listened regularly to "Conversations with Tyler", "How I Built This", and "The Ezra Klein Show" (much improved since Ezra joined the NYT and began actually letting his guests do most of the talking). On tech, my mainstays were "Pivot" and the slightly more serious "Another Podcast."

Music

A few of my perennial favorites issued albums that were just fine (Black Keys, Chaton, Israel Nash, Orions Belte, Wizkid) but overall 2021 felt like a year of remixes, perhaps compiled by homebound artists desperate to wring a little more out of their existing catalogues. (Exhibit A: one of the year's biggest pop hits was a remixed mashup of several 1970s-80s Elton John ballads.) Or maybe I just didn't find time to search as hard, to burrow down esoteric rabbit holes in a quest for new sounds.

In pop, I liked "Flamenco" by Haviah Mighty and perennial hitmaker Mala Rodríguez. Further off the beaten track, "Waylalah" by French DJs Synapson and Moroccan gnawa maestros Bab L'Bluz had a nice thump. Two new discoveries stood out for me: Kondi Band (try "Yeanoh") and · ·-· ·- ··· · -··. (That's "Erased," the name of the Berlin-based label that insisted, inexplicably, on releasing its latest mixtape with all tracks titled—but thankfully not sung—in Morse Code.) The whole album is good, but on "·-·· · - ·· - --· ---" ("Let It Go") Peter Broderick stands out as a singer with something to say.

Movies

On the lighter side, Don't Look Up was a potent, laugh-so-I-don't-cry skewering of the ineptitude of contemporary American society to confront even existential threats. I can't recall a better critique of the left-wing preference for struggling over succeeding than the final scene of the protagonists accepting their demise while chuckling "Man, oh man, did we try!"

On the darker side, nothing beat The Power of the Dog's unsettling aura of foreboding, or its ending.

Among blockbusters, Dune was fine, Tenet (actually a late 2020 release) was intriguing, and The Matrix: Resurrections was as deeply disappointing a sequel to my favorite franchise as I feared. Stowaway was underappreciated.

TV series

I loved the latest seasons of Succession, Babylon Berlin, and The Expanse. I also caught some great shows I had missed from recent years, the most interesting of which were Our Boys, The Investigation, and The Plot Against America.

IV. Looking Ahead to 2022

My main resolutions for 2022 include trying to avoid getting flu-rona and avoid getting older. Wish me luck.

More seriously, Nina and I look forward to another year watching Stella bloom and discover the world around her with her characteristic delight.

After a year as The World's Busiest Unemployed Person, I'll be working to write my master's thesis (the final requirement for my degree) then return to professional life. Nina also plans to return to work, so in all likelihood 2022 will lead us away from our temporary home here in the village and toward new horizons. Precisely where, we can only guess.

Talking 'The Algerian Dream' on Maghreb-Orient Express

2021-10-31T12:00:00.008-04:00

My studies in Paris this year have given me the chance to visit the city regularly throughout the year. I took advantage of my latest visit to join this week's episode of "Maghreb-Orient Express," French broadcaster TV5MONDE's cultural program on the broader Middle East and North Africa.

Some readers may remember that I also appeared remotely on an episode of the show back in 2016, to discuss my photography and writing on Algeria.

The weekly program features a fantastic slate of writers, singers, and other artists, doing their best to break down cross-cultural misunderstanding and animosity in an age that is sadly rife with both. So this year the producers invited me to return after hearing about my new book, The Algerian Dream, I was all to happy to oblige.

The show is taped in advance for scheduling purposes but broadcast exactly as recorded, making it effectively like live TV— and ratcheting up the pressure. Appearing on live TV (especially in a foreign language) is a challenging exercise in thinking on one's feet, and as expected this episode included some surprises—most notably when presenter Mohamed Kaci tossed me a tough question about the latest round of intense diplomatic chest-thumping between the French and Algerian governments. (In answering, I did my best to steer the discussion back to issues of actual relevance to the young Algerians who are my book's subject.)

The episode runs 26 minutes and includes interviews with French-Lebanese singer Yara Lapidus, French writer Laure Limongi, and me. I invite French speakers to watch on TV5MONDE online, Facebook, or YouTube. And if you enjoy it, please share with others!

The Algeria Bouteflika Built

2021-09-22T09:01:00.002-04:00

Throughout much of my time in the country, this creepy poster of Algerians sporting Bouteflika's eyes graced a wall of the Houari Boumediene International Airport in Algiers.

As its title suggests, my new book, The Algerian Dream: Youth and the Quest for Dignity, is the story of a nation, especially its young generation. But one individual's name recurs repeatedly in that story: Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Perhaps no man did more than Bouteflika, the country's president from 1999 to 2019, to shape the Algeria in which that young generation's "quest for dignity" began—or to make their quest necessary in the first place.

Bouteflika, the man so many Algerians (only half jokingly) kidded might outlive them all, died last week, leaving behind a complicated legacy but one that did few favors to his countrymen who survive him, particularly the youth who will be forced to live with the impact of his actions (and his inaction) for years to come.

Bouteflika's legacy and its implications for Algeria's future are the subject of my latest piece for the Atlantic Council, where I am now a nonresident senior fellow for North Africa.

Read the full article at the Atlantic Council MENASource blog: "Mourned by some, cursed by others, former President Bouteflika left Algeria ill-prepared for the future."

Book Launch: 'The Algerian Dream' Is Here!

2021-09-01T08:43:00.004-04:00

The seeds of human progress are sowed by those who dare to dream—and it is their stories we should be celebrating.

That's the belief that motivated me to write my new book, The Algerian Dream: Youth and the Quest for Dignity. It's also what motivated me through the long journey to publication, a journey that ends today.

Today is the official worldwide release of The Algerian Dream, which is now available from booksellers worldwide.

I am grateful to so many people who helped me to write this book, and particularly to the many inspiring young Algerians who I met during my years in the country, and whose story is still being written. My hope is that this book will help outsiders better understand the dynamics shaping contemporary Algeria, paving the way for new generations of Algerians to tell their own stories to the outside world.

I invite readers everywhere to discover the book, and I look forward to your feedback!

More information:

Find full details about the book here, including where to buy it worldwide. (Yes, even in Algeria!)

Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for more updates on the book.

A Star Is Born

2021-06-20T12:55:00.002-04:00

Stella in her Father's Day outfit

"Les pères de famille sont les derniers aventuriers des temps modernes."

The words come from Charles Péguy, a French poet (and father of four) writing over a century ago: Fathers are the last adventurers of modern times.

A friend sent me the quote back in the spring, shortly after my wife, Nina, gave birth to our first child, a wonderful daughter we named Stella. But so far at least, the words seem very much exaggerated. Motherhood, which overcame Nina more instantly and totally, is incontestably arduous. Fatherhood, by contrast, feels like a slow build, one that inches day-by-day from the realm of the surreal to the real as the little one grows more into a person, with her own preferences, expressions, and quirks of personality.

Since joining the family, Stella has prompted many adjustments but generally not pushed us to our limits the way most newborns do. For a while, progress in finalizing my book slowed and my attention to my grad school classes waned, but overall the transition has been manageable. In large part that's because Nina and I have both been lucky to be able to take time away from work and enjoy the support of generous family in these first weeks and months. (Nina's parents and brother live nearby us, out here in the tranquil German countryside, and my mother is visiting this month from the US. All have helped us tremendously.)

Bourek and Chorba have also adjusted to Stella's presence; once they realized she was too small to take them on walks or offer them treats, they quickly lost interest (for now, at least).

A very curious Bourek and Chorba greeted the new arrival in her first hours.

Stella means "star" in Latin. Several of her aunties and uncles back in Algeria have already taken to calling her Nedjma, the local equivalent.

Selecting her name was a long process, driven by strong opinions on both sides. One major requirement was that her name be pronounceable both by my English-speaking family and Nina's German-speaking one, as well as in the French-speaking world, where we have long lived and will likely live again.

For me, the choice of a celestial name was also important. I have spent most of my life deliberately cultivating a sense of wonder for the world and following that curiosity around the globe. There remains much to discover here on Earth, but the promise of so much more in the universe beyond. While technological limitations likely mean I'll spend out my days exploring this planet, a wider range of adventures may be open to future generations. Who knows, our little girl may be the first in the family to see the stars up close.

Whatever path she chooses, Nina and I hope that spirit of adventure and discovery will guide Stella and take her far. Our job, for now, is to prepare her for that journey.

Parliamentary Elections Won’t Rescue Algeria from its Legitimacy Problem

2021-06-12T03:33:00.004-04:00

A crowd listens to citizen proposals at an early Hirak march in Algiers (2019).

Today is election day in Algeria, albeit under tense circumstances. Arrests of activists and journalists have expanded in recent days; the latest tally counts over 220 detainees. While putting many Algerians on edge, this campaign will do nothing to inspire participation in today's vote. For more on the stakes of today's polls and their context, read my latest analysis, published earlier this week at the Atlantic Council's MENA Source blog:

Arriving on the heels of two years of overt popular contestation, Algeria’s June 12 parliamentary elections will not suffice to resolve the country’s deep political impasse.

The upcoming polls are the latest attempt by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s administration to claim a mantle of legitimacy it sorely lacks. Both Tebboune’s election i December 2019 and a constitutional referendum last November appeared to deliver the results he and his sponsors in the country’s powerful security forces sought. High levels of abstention and protest, however, highlighted a wide gulf separating Algerians from their leaders (in the country of forty-three million, fewer than one in seven eligible voters voted for the constitution, which passed nonetheless).

Algeria’s rulers have long dismissed this gulf but it became undeniable in 2019 when the Hirak protest movement erupted, bringing an end to the twenty-year reign of Tebboune’s predecessor, Abdelaziz Bouteflika. The mass demonstrations, which were triggered by Bouteflika’s choice to run for a fifth presidential term but were fed by years of accumulated frustration and indignity, also plunged the country into a political deadlock. For two years, gray-haired authorities have faced off against protesters drawn from a population that is much younger, hungry for opportunity, and less accepting of Algeria’s longstanding isolation. ...

I invite you to read the full article here: "Parliamentary elections won’t rescue Algeria from its legitimacy problem." And if you enjoyed this analysis and want to learn more about current dynamics in Algeria, consider pre-ordering The Algerian Dream, my forthcoming book on Algeria's young generations. Full details here.

Two Years On, Algeria’s Hirak Is Poised for a Rebirth

2021-02-16T11:10:00.001-05:00

Exactly two years ago, residents of Kherrata, a nondescript town several hours' drive east of the Algerian capital, marched in protest against plans to prolong the rule of Algeria's president—and with it the era of corruption, waste, and repression he embodied. Days later, on February 22, 2019, their anger inspired millions of Algerians across the country to take to the streets, launching months of mass demonstrations for fundamental political change.

The frustration and indignities that inspired that movement, which became known as the hirak, are the subject of my forthcoming book, The Algerian Dream, to be published later this spring.

Last year, protesters paused the hirak due to the pandemic, but as Algeria marks the movement's second anniversary, its root causes are as pervasive as ever, making its resurgence all but certain. This morning, protestors began marching in Kherrata once more, presaging a new phase for the movement, as I argue in a retrospective on Algeria's hirak published today at the Atlantic Council's MENASource blog.

I invite you to read the full article here: "Two years on, Algeria’s Hirak is poised for a rebirth."

The Lesson of 2020: To Build Back Better, First Get the Structure Right

2021-01-28T10:31:00.003-05:00

This image is not an accident: Car near port of Beirut, 2017.

In my 2020 retrospective, I promised a reflection on last year's greatest lessons for humanity. Turns out, if you boil it down far enough, there's just one big one:

Two years ago Nina and I visited my aunt and uncle in Colorado, spending a week at their cabin outside Granby, near Rocky Mountain National Park. In 2020, Colorado recorded the three largest wildfires in state history. One of them, the East Troublesome Fire, finally halted just a stone's throw from the cabin's front door. The season's fires collectively burned 840,000 acres, an area larger than Rhode Island—but not because of drought or beetle-infested dead timber. Not really.

Two years earlier we were strolling with friends along the Beirut corniche, surrounded by joggers, fishermen, skateboarders, and kids on tricycles. In 2020, their world was turned upside down, their businesses and schools and homes ruined, and over 200 killed—but not by an abandoned pile of fertilizer igniting in the port. Not really.

And a few decades before that, I was born into a world with problems that had worsened until they threatened our species' very existence: nuclear war, epidemic disease, climate change. In 2020, we all saw our world turned upside down—but not by a virus from a wet market in Wuhan. Not really.

The real problem? We can't get the structure right.

* * *

Let me illustrate what I mean by focusing on my own country, the United States.

It shouldn't have taken a cop choking the life out of George Floyd on a Minneapolis sidewalk, millions plunging willingly into QAnon fantasy-land while a deadly pandemic ravages the real world, or Confederate-flag-toting paramilitary wannabes storming state houses and the US Capitol for all to see that America is broken. Some did see it earlier. Anyone with common sense can see it now.

How did the US get here? By fighting over the symptoms, not the causes of our woes: for too long, too many failed to notice—much less nurture—the boring structures, institutions, and processes that might actually allow us to solve our problems. We failed to update them to keep pace with the times, or to defend them from nefarious reactionaries tinkering under the hood: choosing their voters by gerrymandering congressional districts, reapportioning resources and representation by manipulating the national census, or trampling norms to pack the Supreme Court. Perhaps deluded that because they represent noble causes they need not fight ignoble battles, progressives ignored these structural attacks and for too long failed to counter them. As a result, the US is today a land where "corporations are people" and "money is speech", where the electoral college allows a few thousand retirees in Midwestern diners to elect the world's most powerful leader, and where the Democratic half of the Senate represents 41 million more Americans than the Republican half.

The result is deadlocked government and stalled progress on the many proposals that most Americans actually support, from a public healthcare option (70%) to increased renewable energy investment (67%) to stricter gun laws (53%) and more.

It has become nearly impossible for Americans to solve basic societal problems—much less grand existential ones—without first repairing the very structures we use for problem solving.

* * *

Popular revolts against power have been a fact of life for eons. But in the modern era, the one that came to define the genre was the French Revolution, when the pitchfork-wielding masses stormed the Bastille fortress and later executed King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette.

I spent much of 2020 thinking about a more recent revolution: the one I witnessed firsthand the previous year in Algeria. The book I have been writing (and that I will publish this spring) explores the origins and impacts of that uprising, but more fundamentally it explores a critical question: What happens when the ground shifts beneath a society and its state, imposing novel challenges? Can the state adapt, retool, and restructure to face the challenge? Or does it refuse and retrench, opting instead to gamble that it can defy history and maintain the status quo forever?

The second response leads to stormed Bastilles, executed monarchs, and prolonged turbulence. The path of adaptation, however, enables new growth and possibilities—to those societies who can pull it off.

In my lifetime, nearly every society on earth has been upended by a perennial source of disruption: a new communication technology. The Internet first threw us an innocent fake (the days of dial-up, EBay, Geocities, Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc.) then hit us with a roar (cheap smartphones, mobile data, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc.) from which we will not soon recover. As access exploded, social media flattened discourse, bowled aside information curators and gatekeepers, and undermined the very foundations of our previous reality: shared experience and shared truth.

Institutional carnage has resulted (and with it, real carnage too). The subsequent reordering has only just started, and will not end soon. One thing is certain: this reordering can proceed much more smoothly, and produce much better outcomes, if we actually focus on the real issue at hand. In other words, on structure, not its symptoms.

* * *

In the US, this means understanding why progressives have repeatedly failed to convert popular support for a long list of issues into law. In reality, it's because while our side focused on individual solutions, a rapid technological shift and deliberate manipulation by our opponents warped the very system through which those solutions could be born into law.

Forward-thinking Americans who want to see any progress should set aside their pet issues and instead focus on structural reform. DC and Puerto Rico statehood, Senate filibuster reform, National Popular Vote, reversing Citizens United, redistricting reform, ranked-choice voting: instituting any one of these ideas would have a greater longer-term impact than any single social policy imaginable. Only then can we effectively confront the web of climate, land use, invasive species, and socioeconomic challenges feeding the western wildfires.

The technological transformations driving much of the institutional dislocation in the US are nearly universal today, so while national contexts vary, similar focus on structural reform will be needed in every country. Citizens of Lebanon, highlighted above, suffer from spiraling inflation, frequent power outages, corruption, weak leadership, and avoidable disasters in large part because Lebanon's model of governance, now deadlocked and ineffectual, was established by colonial administrators a century ago. Fixing the day-to-day mismanagement will require an update of that model to reflect the transformed context.

On an international level, institutions are even fewer and even weaker, and more bad-faith actors roam unimpeded. In building effective global and regional governance (of the kind that could help coordinate an effective international response to the next pandemic), humanity's task is only just beginning.

Individual institutions also have a huge role to play. Companies, first and foremost, need to explore new organizational structures, revenue models, and management strategies to better align their shareholders and their stakeholders.

The challenge is individual, too. How can each of us focus more of our energies on the structural causes of our problems, not their day-to-day symptoms? It's a question that smart minds across the world need to consider seriously. For my part, this month I have begun a Master's degree at the Sorbonne in Paris in information and knowledge systems—an interdisciplinary field exploring how human beings can best organize, share, and build together. Exactly where these studies will lead me remains to be seen, but I intend to keep thinking about these big questions and contribute where I can.

The reasons to focus more energy on repairing structural failures are only growing. Covid-19—and most countries' inept responses to this predictable catastrophe—should have woken us up. More troubling are the pandemic's parallels to climate change, a comparison that doesn't augur well for humanity, which is only beginning to confront our greatest existential threat. (Our greatest threat, that is, until we invent AI.)

As we build back in 2021 and the years to come, we will be forced to choose which problems to prioritize. Will we stumble ineptly into the Bastille scenario—violent, destructive, and plunging us into the unknown? Or can we rise to the moment, organize ourselves intelligently enough to overcome the great civilizational challenges before us, and live to see what promise lies beyond?

Further food for thought:

"We Have the Power to Destroy Ourselves Without the Wisdom to Ensure That We Don't" by Toby Ord

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: 2020 in Review

2020-12-29T07:08:00.003-05:00

Best Nine of 2020: My most popular shots from the year on Instagram (@ibnibnbattuta)

More than any year in recent memory, 2020 made "have nots" of a great many "haves," highlighted the yawning gulf between the two, and pushed many to the edge of survival.

Nina and I were among the lucky few for whom the year's challenges were inconvenient, not existential. We worked hard to make the most of that chance.

I. Life

We began the year by hosting friends and family in Algeria for an off-the-grid desert excursion. My debut as a reality television host followed soon after, with the launch of Andi Hulm. Shortly before the pandemic arrived, I left my job to focus on writing the book I envisioned as the grand finale to my seven-year Algeria experience. At the same time, Nina and I also planned our next adventure: a long-anticipated, multi-month grand tour we imagined would include unwinding on beaches in Southeast Asia, sailing and snorkeling in the Philippines, hiking in the Himalayas, visiting friends in Tokyo and Jerusalem and Pretoria, and more.

Then the coronavirus turned the world upside down. Rather than an extended celebration of our time in Algeria, our "Bourexit" took the form of a hasty escape to Germany. And rather than embarking on the voyage of a lifetime, we've hardly budged since our arrival here. (Just one exception: After Algerian authorities rejected my visa application, Nina briefly returned alone to Algiers in August to collect our dogs and close out our apartment.)

Germany has managed the pandemic better than many countries—not least my own—allowing us to live in a comfortable bubble amid a world in crisis. We held backyard barbecues with her family and took sailing lessons on a nearby lake. I wrangled with German grammar and joined a local lacrosse team (an unexpected return to a chapter of my life I thought was long gone). While I drafted my book at a snail's pace, succumbing often to distraction, Nina finished out her annual contract with the UN, earning her piece of a Nobel Peace Prize in the process. And I announced my book, The Algerian Dream, to the world through a successful pre-sale campaign.

Nina and I close the year somewhere neither of us expected to be: living in an 18th-century farmhouse, surrounded by pigs and cows and sheep, in a tiny village in the German hinterland. Though that wasn't in the plans, there's probably no better place we could hope to ride out the remaining months of the pandemic, or to prepare for the next adventure we've opted to embrace: parenthood. Das Baby is due in March 2021.

A new life for us, and for Bourek and Chorba, in Germany

II. Current Events

I spent much of 2020 trying to process the pandemic and its many aftershocks. Just weeks into the crisis, I wrote "The Confusion Compounds the Contagion: 10 Lessons about our World from Covid-19," a list I'm proud to say has held up well over the subsequent months. At Middle East Eye I published "Plagued: Misreading Camus in the Age of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter," a reflection on Albert Camus' The Plague written just as flagrant racial and social inequities, exacerbated by the pandemic, were sparking historic protests in the US, France, and elsewhere.

Political theater intertwined with the year's events as much as ever, though in politics as in life writ large, the pandemic had a way of separating the men—or more often than not, the women—from the boys. Rational, technocratic, science-heeding leaders faced the year's tests far more ably than the nationalist, populist blowhards, whose negligence and malevolence cost even more lives than usual in 2020. Donald Trump was impeached and then bludgeoned (repeatedly, at his own insistence) at the polls, a long-overdue humiliation for a monster who has inflicted a long litany of horrors upon American democracy, the global order, and the wellbeing not just of Americans but of people worldwide.

In the New Year, I hope to share an article on the great lessons that human society must take away from 2020's crises if we are to survive those to come.

III. Media & Influences

Here's a selection of favorite media and related influences that colored my year:

Quote of the Year

If you thought you had it bad in 2020, consider this professor's predicament: "Against my best wishes, I have been shot and am being treated in the ER. I also have COVID, and the divorce is getting messy."

Thinkers & Ideas

If you could travel back in time a year ago to deliver a single popular press article to humanity, to explain to them in plain language what was coming and how they should and shouldn't confront it, which would you choose? To save the most lives possible, you probably couldn't beat "This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic" (subtitle: "It's not R."), Zeynep Tufekci's brilliant overview of the pandemic's most critical characteristic: dispersion rates. The Pareto Principle strikes again. Read it.

Tufekci, it's worth noting, is not an epidemiologist. Rather, she's a social science with a deep understanding of network dynamics in human society. Well before others, she sounded the alarm on the perverse effects of social media, and this year she was a lone voice calling unambiguously for universal mask wearing long before many public health officials. In August, the New York Times ran a deservedly admiring profile of her; that was a month before she published the article above.

In my continual search for thought-provoking reading material, this year I sought more of both the highly random and the highly curated. I leaned further into Twitter (which led to some interesting finds but lots of lost hours) but also subscribed to The Browser, which provided a steadier drip of great long-form content. I also began following several new publications, like Newlines Magazine and Rest of World and subscribing to more newsletters, of which Patrick Tanguay's Sentiers is consistently the best.

Alongside Tufekci, several of my other perennial favorite public intellectuals remained great sources of information, ideas, and insight, including Agnes Callard, Tyler Cowen, and Laila Lalami.

A few key ideas stuck with me throughout the year:

"The way the coronavirus disproportionately affects older people is the exact way the climate crisis disproportionately affects young people.... You want young people to sacrifice — to stop socializing, to shut ourselves inside — so older people can live. But many older people aren’t sacrificing so the youth can live." (from 18-year-old Colombian-American climate activist Jamie Margolin)
"Trump voters wanted to blow up the system. Well, here we go." (Julia Ioffe writing in GQ in March)
The pandemic crushed workers, yes, but it disproportionately crushed working women. The same ones who, before the pandemic hit, already did around $11 billion in unpaid labor.
"America’s tolerance for mass murder is the coronavirus’ best friend." (Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times)
2020 probably delivered more scientific progress than any other year in my lifetime, with important breakthroughs in medicine, computing, energy, and more.
"We Have the Power to Destroy Ourselves Without the Wisdom to Ensure That We Don't" (a lecture from Oxford philosopher and futurist Toby Ord) Worth reflecting on as we huddle at home in isolation amid a global catastrophe.
Inequality in our societies is so much worse than you think. Here's the staggering visual proof.

Essays

Few were as delighted as satirists when the pandemic peeled back the curtain, exposing many of our fellow citizens' idiocy. And none published better satire this year than McSweeney's. Here's just a small sampling:

On the serious side, these 10 pieces struck important chords for me this year:

"Acceptance Parenting" by Agnes Callard (The Point, October 2) "Unlike my forebears, I don’t know the things I need to know in order to be a good parent, and none of the people telling me to calm down know those things either. The only one who might know, my grown child, doesn’t yet exist."
"The Four Quadrants of Conformism" by Paul Graham (personal blog, July) Silicon Valley veteran Graham's contribution to this summer's raging debates over free speech and cancel culture gave me more to think about than any other.
"The Man Who Refused to Spy" by Laura Secor (New Yorker, September 14)
"The Pandemic is a Portal" by Arundhati Roy (Financial Times, April 3) "Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it."
"The Real 'Lord of the Flies': What Happened When Six Boys Were Shipwrecked for 15 Months" by Rutger Bregman (The Guardian, May 9) "While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year."
"Ten Years Later – How the Arab Spring changed the world" by multiple authors (Reaction, December 17) "What most observers fail to see is that the Arab Spring is not an event that took place in 2010-11; it is an era of the Middle East and North Africa’s history that began in 2010-11. I’m not writing these words ten years after the Arab Spring but ten years into the Arab Spring."
"The Unrelenting Horizonlessness of the Covid World" by Nick Couldry and Bruce Schneier (CNN, September 22) "What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It's that, if we can no longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant, retrospectively pointless."
"We Are Living in a Failed State" by George Packer (The Atlantic, June) and "A Political Obituary for Donald Trump" by George Packer (The Atlantic, December) "The election didn’t end his lies—nothing will—or the deeper conflicts that the lies revealed. But we learned that we still want democracy. This, too, is the legacy of Donald Trump."
"Wikipedia, 'Jeopardy!,' and the Fate of the Fact" by Louis Menand (New Yorker, November 16) "In the Internet age, it can seem as if there’s no reason to remember anything. But information doesn’t always amount to knowledge."

Podcasts

I rarely missed an episode of Jordan Schneider's ChinaTalk, Tyler Cowen's Conversations with Tyler, Edge.org Conversations, NPR's How I Built This, or Monocle's The Foreign Desk.

This year I also discovered Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway's Pivot. Though it sometimes verges on the tawdry, it's high-quality infotainment offering real insight into the tech giants shaping our world.

TV Series

My favorites this year were Halt and Catch Fire, which brought the 1990s dot-com gold rush to life with vibrant characters; quirky and touching British-Japanese detective tale Giri/Haji; and Danish political saga Borgen.

1983, a Polish alt-history thriller, was intriguing, while American alt-history drama The Plot Against America was as unsettling as intended.

Some of my old favorites continued to shine: Le Bureau des Légendes, Deutschland 83/86/89, and The Handmaid's Tale.

Movies

Movies had already long been slipping from my media diet, a trend only accelerated by movie theatres' disappearance from cultural life. Of the short list of films I saw, the ones I found most stimulating were all documentaries: 13th, David Attenborough's Life on Our Planet, and The Social Dilemma.

Music

The songs I listened to most this year are here, featuring Tamikrest, Claude Fontaine, Tame Impala, Papooz, and more.

Favorite album? "Tamotaït" by Touareg blues rockers Tamikrest
Favorite song? Nick Monaco's "Green"
Favorite cover? Glass Animals' "Heart-Shaped Box"

Bonus: Did you ever wonder, "Why Do We Even Listen to New Music?"

Books

Tim Mackintosh-Smith's Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires was as epically long as its title suggests, yet consistently fascinating. It rightly places the Arabic language at the center of the story.

After devouring Peter Hessler's Country Driving, about his wanderings in a rapidly transforming rural China, I eagerly dove into The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, probably my favorite book of the year.

IV. Looking Ahead to 2021

Next year holds great promise.

For the world, there is the possibility of turning the corner and beginning to chart a post-Trump, post-Covid course, though global inequality will cause toxic nationalism and the pandemic to linger on.

As for me, you might think that a baby and a book release would be enough excitement to plan for one year. But Nina and I have more up our sleeves. I am slated to begin a part-time Master's program at the Sorbonne in Paris next month, and during the course of the year at least one of us expects to re-enter the job market, which could entail moving away from our quaint German village.

Apart from a potential international move, travel is likely to be complicated by continued restrictions and by our new family member's arrival. That grand trip will have to wait.

Announcing "The Algerian Dream": Signed Books Now Available for Pre-Order

2020-11-22T08:57:00.013-05:00

As regular readers of this blog already know, I have spent most of 2020 writing a book about my years in Algeria, entitled The Algerian Dream. With my manuscript nearly complete, today it's time to share some more details with the world.

I am proud to present the above video, in which I offer a brief overview of the book, and to announce that signed copies are now available for pre-order via this crowdfunding campaign (the proceeds from which will help cover the substantial up-front costs of publication). The book will publish and ship in Summer 2021.

If you have enjoyed reading my dispatches from Algeria over the past seven years, you will find lots to love in this book, which in many ways is a culmination of my Algeria experience. In it I present the most important things I've learned from and about this fascinating country and its people. From the start, I knew I wanted to center the book around the inspiring young Algerians I've met; that's why I'm pitching it as "A book about youth and the quest for dignity in one of the world's most unusual countries."

In the long run, I sincerely hope that these young Algerians will be able to tell their own story for themselves. For now, I'm sharing what I've learned in hopes that it can help more people discover Algeria and the young generations who are reshaping its future.

Visit the pre-sale campaign here to learn more about the book. Please consider supporting the campaign before it ends on December 21, 2020 by pre-ordering today. Shipping is available worldwide, including for free within the European Union. Please also help me spread the word by sharing this campaign with others who may be interested. Thank you!

Update: The pre-sale campaign was a great success, thanks to the generous support of over 150 backers across 21 countries on six continents! If you would still like to pre-order, please visit this page. And stay tuned here for more details ahead of the book's worldwide public release in Summer 2021!

Maghreb Photography Award Winners

2020-09-22T09:00:00.005-04:00

One of my three winning entries: Algerian football supporters in Marseille, France (July 2019).

I'm pleased to announce that three of my entries—all of them related to Algeria—won prizes in the 2020 Maghreb Photography Awards, an annual contest for photographers hailing from or shooting in the wider North Africa region.

See the full winner's gallery here, which includes my three winning entries:

1. "Celebrating with Ali la Pointe" (single shot, above): Special Mention (overall), Grand Winner (Editorial category), Gold Medal (Reportage/News subcategory). Brandishing a banner of Ali La Pointe, a martyred hero of the Battle of Algiers, young French-Algerian fans celebrate the Algerian men's soccer team's victory in the 2019 Africa Cup in Marseille, France.

2. "Belaredj" (series): Silver Medal (Fine Art - Abstract subcategory). The traditional garment of Algeria's women, the pearl-white haik is now disappearing, replaced by styles preferred by younger generations. In Algiers, local artist Souad Douibi features the garment prominently in her "Belaredj" street performances. Photographed on Kodak Portra 160 film with antique Rolleicord camera.

3. "Children of Exile" (series): Silver Medal (People - Children subcategory). Sahraoui children attend a youth rally in Tindouf, on the remote windswept plains of western Algeria. Separating them from their homeland is a heavily fortified Moroccan-built sand berm. Sahraoui refugees have inhabited camps in this region for over 40 years, spanning generations. Their future remains a contentious question in the region. Photos taken on Kodak Portra 160 film with antique Rolleiflex camera.

Peruse the entire winners' gallery here and enjoy some beautiful photographs.

A Conversation on "Andi Hulm" and Youth Entrepreneurship in Algeria

2020-08-24T08:49:00.002-04:00

Today at 12pm EST (5pm Algiers time), I have been invited to speak about "Andi Hulm", the reality TV show for young Algerian entrepreneurs I hosted earlier this year, as well as related questions around economic opportunity for youth in Algeria. Joining me to share her firsthand perspectives will be Ouarda Benlakhlef, one of the show's finalists.

The virtual discussion will be hosted by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at my alma mater, Georgetown University, and narrated by one of my favorite professors from my time there, Dr. Noureddine Jebnoun.

I will also preview my forthcoming book on Algeria and its youth, The Algerian Dream, to be published in December.

~~RSVP here to attend.~~ UPDATE: A recording of the presentation is now available here.

Note: The full show is available to watch on YouTube.

A World of Statues (and Why You Should Help Tear Some Down)

2020-06-26T05:50:00.002-04:00

Rome, Italy

Amid the wave of protests that have followed George Floyd's killing, the US has seen Christopher Columbus beheaded in Boston, Confederate generals toppled nationwide, Washington and Jefferson felled in Portland, and other public statues targeted by Americans protesting the country's longstanding racial injustices and inequities. Recognizing the writing on the wall, even some southern Republicans are dropping their opposition to the dismantling of these symbols. Also, statues aren't the only symbols under attack: pushback is growing against the Confederate flag, which was recently banned at Nascar rallies.

The trend has spurred action beyond the US, too. Across Belgium, statues of King Leopold, brutal oppressor of the Congo, have been defaced or torn down. In Bristol, England, protesters wrenched a statue of slave trader Edward Colston from its pedestal and flung it into the harbor. Oxford University suddenly relented to a longstanding campaign to remove a statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes. And on the non-statue front, the Netherlands may finally be giving up its absurd and anachronistic justifications of its national blackface tradition.

Those who oppose dismantling these symbols claim that our shared history is being attacked—or even erased. Some of these arguments are simply misguided; others are disingenuous attempts to preserve emblems of oppressive hierarchies. All of them are flawed.

"If we tear down Columbus' statues we won't know history"

bro, you think he was the first to land in america. you already don't know history.
— jeb (@LlamaInaTux) June 10, 2020

A statue is a highly visible, unambiguous expression of who and what a society values, devoid of any context or nuance. It proclaims in hard stone or cold bronze who a society venerates as a hero, who we put on a pedestal. Sure, most days we walk past them without noticing. But if one percent of people who pass them on a given day notice them, and one percent of those bother to wonder who the person is, then inquire of a friend or Google, it nonetheless extends the hero's legacy, denoting in clear, public terms the values that the society has chosen to elevate and celebrate.

Even the worst and dumbest among us can grasp the symbolic importance of statues. That's why in 2001 the Taliban (a totalitarian cult intolerant of diversity) dynamited the Bamyan Buddhas, or why in 2003 US military units (steered by the same administration that overthrew the government of a traumatized nation without any rebuilding plan) assembled reporters before felling a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad.

For nearly as long as we've been erecting tributes to today's heroes, humans have been tearing down yesterday's. In ancient Egypt, successive kingdoms often destroyed the relics of their predecessors (as when a certain boy king named Tutankhamen destroyed his father's short-lived sun temples and reinstated the old gods). The French Revolution was famed for its rowdy mobs that attacked statues of royals and saints. In 1991, Russians marked the USSR's collapse by tearing down the statue of the KGB's founder in Moscow. And in Algeria—a place dear to my heart—upon independence in 1962 exuberant locals set about removing statues of colonial-era oppressors and renaming streets for liberation heroes. (For a fascinating glimpse into that period, see this thread by historian Dónal Hasset. Note: His thread quotes Fanon's description of colonial Algeria cited in the title above.)

Zagreb, Croatia

So, amid the current wave of statue-toppling in the US and elsewhere, what's a reasonable person to do?

Lend a hand.

That's right, I suggest you roll up your sleeves, set aside qualms about legality for a moment, and go help tear down any statues that celebrate immoral values with no place in today's society. Sure, some will gripe and say it's wrong. But here's three good reasons to join in despite their objections:

1. No, we don't need statues to prevent us from forgetting our history. We've got history books, history classes in school, historians, and history museums for that. Statues are symbols of veneration, not sources of learning.

Here in Germany, where I've spent the last three months, no rampaging mobs have torn down statues. Why? Because the statues worth removing are already long gone. As part of its extensive effort to move forward responsibly from the horrors of the Nazi-era, the country removed public celebrations of Hitler and his regime. And despite what some Confederate fantasists might argue, Germans haven't forgotten their past. If anything, their attitude toward it is much more evolved than we Americans' own reaction to our Civil War—even if we've had a century more to sort ourselves out. Although celebrations of the painful past are gone, reminders of it still stand: here in Kassel, where I've spent the last few months, at the end of our street stands a hulking brown building that, during the Nazi era, housed the regional Gestapo headquarters. It has been left intact ever since; a plaque out front explains its history plainly and lists it as a "state memorial site."

2. No, the fact that street action sometimes goes awry isn't a reason to soft-pedal. Should that statue of Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco have come down last week? Probably not. Although Grant's legacy on racial issues was complicated, many have argued that he was on the right side of history in this regard. Fine, we've all learned a few things about Grant's legacy in the past couple days, now go put the statue back up and let's get back to work.

Hoping to head off such events in their own locales, these days many political leaders are appointing committees to review local statues. While well intentioned, those efforts may prolong more harm than they prevent. The Colston statue in Bristol illustrates why: Bristol residents had campaigned in vain for years to have the statue removed. But no matter how many op-eds, petitions, and proposals they floated, conservatives in the mayor's office, local council, and the town's elite managed to block action. Recently, a committee was formed to take input from schoolchildren and write a new, more "woke" plaque for the statue, but it collapsed into bickering over wording. A shady group called the Society of Merchant Venturers, which proudly (!) traces its heritage back to the town's original slavers, often managed to block progress. In short, efforts to use the democratic process to fix this problem were going nowhere, because that process was in the grips of people disinterested in progress, and because the statue was already up. But this month, when local residents flung Colston's statue into the harbor, they instantly reversed that status quo. Suddenly the onus was on the reactionary elites: You want that statue back on its pedestal? Then you go use the rusty levers of democracy to convince a majority of us to spend public money to fish it out of the harbor.

Too often in our society, the status quo endures for too long because those in power make excuses for not changing it. Was the Bristol protesters' solution crude? Perhaps, but sometimes that's what it takes to move things forward.

(Side note: British artist Banksy reportedly suggested a compromise for Bristol: "We drag him out the water, put him back on the plinth, tie cable round his neck and commission some life-size bronze statues of protesters in the act of pulling him down. Everyone happy. A famous day commemorated.")

3. No, we don't "owe" it to historical figures to maintain their statues. You know who is actually owed? The people those "great" figures oppressed. Not much we can do about that today. But we also owe something to those who suffer from the continued legacies of that oppression. Those people are alive, and these days most of them are calling for the statues to come down.

They are the minorities and traditionally marginalized groups in our societies, and they want change. The heroes we place on public pedestals symbolize our values, as explained above, so where better to start? Just as statues symbolize a society's values, toppled statues symbolize something, too: the intent to forge social change.

In the book I'm currently writing on modern Algeria, I am exploring several themes around popular revolution. I keep returning to one critical distinction: In every revolution, there are revolutionaries who want to tear down the system and build a new one based on better ideals, and there are other revolutionaries who want to keep the system in place but make sure they're the ones running it. So much of a revolution's course and ultimate outcome is determined by which of those two currents predominates.

Just as they have throughout human history, today those two currents are dueling in the streets and public parks of America, at the foot of pedestals bearing bronze men on horseback. And they're dueling around the world, wherever statues still stand as monuments to antiquated values. This moment is too important for us just to swap out some officials and reshuffle the deck chairs. If you, too, want real change, not just a changing of the guard, toppling statues of immoral figures seems like a great way to signal grand ambitions for what's coming next.

Not convinced yet? Consider this: the current occupant of the White House thinks it's awful that ordinary Americans are tearing down statues of Confederate generals. And when has he ever chosen to stand on the right side of a historical issue?

Plagued: Misreading Camus in the Age of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter

2020-05-30T08:20:00.010-04:00

Right behind Covid-19, Camus fever has recently been sweeping the world, followed closely by new calls for social reform. I recently took a few hours off from writing my forthcoming book, The Algerian Dream, to pen this response to those trends. Update (June 9): A revised and expanded version of this article has just been published at Middle East Eye. Read it in full there. (Une traduction en français est également disponible. Cliquez ici pour lire.) Excerpt below:

Dark times call for great literature. At least that’s what the world’s newspaper editors and literati would have us believe.

Since the coronavirus pandemic emerged as a global menace earlier this spring, seemingly every publication on the planet has run an article comparing our times to that of Albert Camus’ 1947 novel The Plague—and recommending the book as a parable for our troubled times.

Last month, Steve Coll took his turn in the pages of the New Yorker. Alongside praise for Camus’ resistance to the Nazi occupation of France, Coll describes the author as a model of lucid rationality in crisis: “That Camus, writing in the mid-nineteen-forties, could conjure with such clarity, during an epidemic, a political morality that advocates for factual reporting, medical science, and public-health regimens seems astonishing.”

Rendering Algerians invisible

In an age when conspiracy theories run rampant online, and the US president peddles pseudo-science and snake oil from the Oval Office, Coll is right to champion a model anchored in reason. But is there no higher bar towards which we should strive today? A critical factor omitted by Camus and many of his modern admirers suggests an answer. ...

... Continued at Middle East Eye. Read it in full there. (Traduction en français disponible ici.)

The Confusion Compounds the Contagion: 10 Lessons about our World from Covid-19

2020-05-03T08:24:00.003-04:00

We're all in Plato's cave these days. (Image from Olafur Eliasson's "Your Uncertain Shadow" installation)

Among the many shocks that the Covid-19 coronavirus has thrust upon our world in the past months, perhaps none is more disorienting than this: At the height of the information age, we are lost in the dark, fumbling desperately for certainty, any certainty at all.

Until quite recently at least, you could ask any reasonable person when our species' technological, economic, scientific, and philosophical prowess and sophistication were greatest and reliably expect them to answer, "Right now, of course." To be honest, we looked down with pity upon our ancestors of a century ago, then still in the dark about so much, bludgeoning each other through World Wars, and suffering blindly through the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. They were so disorganized, so undisciplined, so divided, so... primitive that they couldn't even properly count the dead from that catastrophe. (Estimates range from 17 to 100 million, the numerical equivalent of "who the hell knows.")

Plus ça change. Today, of course, we have a global internet, well established global health institutions, brilliant scientists worldwide, e-mail and translation software that allow them to communicate seamlessly. Surely we should be faring much better than our forebears. Yet months after the coronavirus's arrival, humanity wastes energy on nationalistic squabbling, suffers needless delays and deaths thanks to incompetent leaders, drowns truth in disinformation and conspiracy theories, and still knows shockingly little about the virus. How does it kill? Who does it kill? At what rate? How does it spread? Is it seasonal? How many has it infected? How many has it killed? Without answers to these most basic questions, measures to contain the virus's spread are just guesswork.

Maybe our predecessors back in 1918 weren't so ignorant after all. Maybe they were thinking what so many of us are today: It is the confusion—the astoundingly simple questions that remain unanswered, day after day, gnawing at us all and leaving our worst imaginations to run wild—that may be hardest to explain to future generations.

* * *

Thankfully, we have learned a few things in recent weeks. Even if politics, poor testing capacity, and reporting inconsistencies plague the statistics, they are still updated globally each day, giving us at least a sense of the pandemic's evolution. The statistics almost certainly undercount the true impact. To date, they tell us that the coronavirus has killed 3 of every 100,000 humans on the planet, 65 of every 100,000 Belgians (the highest country in the latest per capita tallies), and more Americans than were killed in the 15-year Vietnam War. More so than Wuhan, China (where the virus originated), hotspots like northern Italy, Ecuador's Guayaquil, and New York City have been ravaged. To limit the virus's spread, governments around the world have declared lockdowns of varying severity, collapsing economies and transforming our world unrecognizably. 2020, annus horibilis, is brought to you by the words "social distancing", "flatten the curve", and "covidiot."

After weeks of contradictory news, spiraling death tolls, profound economic worry, and the many small indignities prompted by swiftly imposed lockdown, we are all cracking under the pressure, myself included. In late March, Nina and I caught a German government evacuation flight out of Algiers, and are now adjusting to a very different lifestyle here in central Germany. Our departure was too abrupt to allow us to properly complete our planned Bourexit; our dogs and most of our belongings remain in Algiers until we can get a flight back. (Next week? Next month? Next year?) Nina is continuing her job remotely, while I am continuing writing my book and have begun German lessons. The grand trip we had planned for this summer is definitively off the table, and we have little visibility on what lies ahead.

Amid all the uncertainty, I've somehow mustered the energy to lean into the coronavirus news, obsessively tracking the trends that are reshaping our world. Here's this infovore's reflections from the past weeks of reading, conversing, and thinking:

1. We are terrible at this. Thanks to hindsight bias, the fact that almost none of us remember a global pandemic meant that we lacked the imagination to prepare sufficiently for this one. And as it crept upon us, the fact that we cannot truly comprehend exponential growth led us to underestimate it. In the absence of reliable data, humans have no choice but to decide with our guts, and our guts (at least the guts of the 99% of us who aren't geniuses) can only grasp arithmetic change, not exponential compounding. Governments, of course, have more tools at their disposal, and should be held to a higher standard. By that standard, few have impressed.

2. Rethink everything. Until this year, many Americans in my generation believed 9/11 was the moment when everything changed, defining our lives forever. But throughout April, the US lost a full 9/11 worth of people every day-and-a-half. A cataclysm this big is forcing some deep reevaluation. Never before in history have so many people simultaneously reexamined so many long-held beliefs. (Workers should work in the office. Childcare isn't worth anything. Globalization sucks and my country would be better off going it alone. We don't need real-world friends, we've got the internet. If people don't have health insurance, that's their problem, not mine.) The effects—both negative and positive—on the course of human civilization will be tremendous.

3. You don't know the crisis is coming until after it hits. Nobody announced on March 1, "Hey, that virus that has ravaged China is now ready to start spreading worldwide. Please stock up on groceries and prepare your families for months of home lockdown and a shutdown of the global economy." Instead, the news kept growing graver by the day, while still feeling somehow abstract. Until one day, seemingly out of the blue, the UN Secretary General was telling us this would be "the greatest challenge the world has faced since WWII."

4. Once the crisis hits, people show their true stripes. This is true of world leaders, whose responses ranged from the competent (Germany's Merkel, New Zealand's Ardern, Taiwan's Tsai) to the buffoonish and negligent (UK's Johnson, USA's Trump) to the actively destructive (Russia's Putin, Egypt's Sisi, with others showing occasional tendencies too). Women leaders, as others have noted, are beating the average. Under Bolsonaro, Brazil is challenging North Korea to see who might become the world's first government to fall in the Covid-19 era. Just like national leaders, public figures and pundits have proven their mettle or lack thereof (Tyler Cowen's reliably sanguine coverage of new developments remains as invaluable as ever). So too for the general public, with many citizens sensibly following preventative directives while others spread dangerous conspiracy theories, burn 5G antennas, or trash the experts and elites working to save lives. Human folly knows no limits.

5. Everything is possible. The "Overton window"—the range of political options that mainstream thinkers accept—widened dramatically overnight. As a famous sci-fi author recently mused, "The spring of 2020 is suggestive of how much, and how quickly, we can change. It’s like a bell ringing to start a race. Off we go—into a new time." Within days, Covid-19 had delivered policies that would have appeared fantastical just days before. As cataloged in one recent Twitter thread, the American right has won an immigration freeze, re-shoring of manufacturing, and "woke colleges shut down" while US progressives have seen emissions cuts and dramatic leaps toward application of universal basic income and modern monetary theory. (Centrists, a cynic might conclude, just got the virus.) Given how complex the secondary effects of well-studied policies are in normal times, it's a good bet that the swift and severe measures of recent weeks will provoke colossal unforeseen consequences for years to come. Today we can only speculate.

6. Culture matters. In crisis, when there's little time for teaching or nudging the masses toward new behaviors, our cultural defaults are all-important. Tell Germans to expand their lines to leave two meters between each person, and they instantly comply. Back in Algeria, not so much. In the past two decades, wearing of masks when traveling or just going out in public became ubiquitous in many dense Asian countries touched by the SARS and MERS epidemics. Adopting universal mask wearing in response to Covid-19 was automatic in those countries, yet remains a struggle in the rest of the world, where the practice feels uncomfortable and foreign. In the US, confusion abounded in the early weeks around mask supplies, types, efficacy, and usage. Today it's clear: Masks of any kind help diminish viral spread. I predict we will come to view the failure to immediately impose universal mask requirements in public spaces as one of our most critical errors, one that enabled the pandemic's spread and cost thousands of lives.

7. Inequality bites back. The virus has highlighted the vast gulf dividing the haves from the have-nots. Many of the world economy's winners had long preferred to ignore this fact, and today are finding it harder to do so. The difference is stark both within nations—where lockdown policies may be a nuisance to the wealthy but a death sentence to the vulnerable poor—and between them. Internationally, many countries are woefully unprepared to weather the virus or a prolonged economic crisis. Where rich nations can bunker down and ride out the storm thanks to their stocks of wealth (and capacity to acquire new debt), many poorer countries effectively cannot afford a lockdown of any duration. Yet with their wealthy trade partners' economies frozen, neither can they carry on as normal. The World Food Programme already expects to see a doubling of acute hunger this year. Hungry people don't sit and starve—they move. Without unprecedented aid, get ready for an unprecedented refugee crisis.

8. Covid is just the warm-up for the climate crisis. One factor bedeviling our efforts to contain Covid-19's spread is the delay between when an individual contracts the virus and when he/she begins showing symptoms. Many don't show any at all. So how do we expect to tackle an even less visible foe with a delayed impact measured not in days but in decades? This pandemic is revealing much about our capacity to tackle global climate change, and the news ain't good. Look at the poor international coordination, the distrust of capable institutions and elites, and the rampant spread of anti-science conspiracy theories; this performance suggests our odds of beating the climate crisis are dismal. But thinking optimistically, perhaps this crisis will force more people to heed scientists. And the lockdowns have proven to be a boon for animals, in addition to clearing up our polluted skies—welcome developments that citizens worldwide have observed with their own eyes. Sadly, it's not enough. "Despite the vast changes we have made in our lives," one activist writes, "global carbon dioxide emissions are likely to reduce by only about 5.5% this year." To stay below the critical bar of 1.5°C of planetary warming, however, we would need to reduce them by 7.6% annually for the next decade. As he rightly concludes, we now see plainly that consumer action alone isn't sufficient. Corporations must also implement sweeping changes. Not that they will do so willingly. So unless you want to live on a dying planet, get ready for that fight ahead.

9. Work-from-home is a double-edged sword. Covid-19 has obliged institutions of all sorts to rapidly digitize, shifting as many of their old physical and in-person operations to the cloud. For many employers and employees, the overnight switch has been wrenching—but perhaps not as wrenching as one would have imagined. Once the initial angst passed, many office workers have discovered that work-from-home arrangements have surprising advantages; maybe we shouldn't go back to the office at all. Many employers are actually thinking along the same lines. How might they save on rent by downsizing the office, moving to a cheaper city, or adding future hires off-site? And here's the rub: If Dunder Mifflin Paper Co can hire Pam to work in her living room down the street in Scranton, Pennsylvania, then they could also hire Priya in Mumbai to do the same—for a fraction of the salary. If the last decades of economic dislocation in the developed world (most acutely in the US) have centered on job losses in skilled manufacturing, next we're likely to see similar dislocation in the middle and upper strata of the workplace. We already knew that white-collar workers were next in line, but what looked before Covid-19 like another multi-decade shift may now be rapidly accelerated. Good news for Priya, bad news for Pam. Which brings me to my final point...

10. Get ready. Eventually, we will "hammer and dance" (or at least muddle) our way out of this mess. But once we do, the world won't sit still and give us a moment to catch our breath. Looking for the right time to start that self-improvement project, train up in new skills, or learn a new language? If you're lucky enough to be sitting at home during this crisis, you won't get a better chance than now.

From these notes, you might conclude that I am pessimistic about humanity's present predicament and our future prospects. Far from it. While I am fascinated by the challenges before us, I remain optimistic that we might yet wring much goodness from this crisis. Stay healthy, forget the old "normal", read widely and think deeply, and get ready to roll up your sleeves and dive into the new world that will soon emerge.

For further inspiration, here are 10 sources I have found valuable in recent weeks:

"The Pandemic is a Portal" by Arundhati Roy (Financial Times)
"Did Anyone Predict Coronavirus?" by Tom Chivers (UnHerd)
"The Virus Should Wake Up the West" by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (Bloomberg)
"The 'New Normal': Thoughts about the Shape of Things to Come in the Post-Pandemic World" by Nicholas Eberstadt (National Bureau of Asian Research)
"Shipwrecked" by Adam Shatz (London Review of Books)
"We Have the Power to Destroy Ourselves Without the Wisdom to Ensure That We Don't" (podcast) by Toby Ord (Edge)
"The New Future of Work: A Conversation with Matt Mullenweg" (podcast) by Sam Harris (Making Sense)
"How Coronavirus Is Shaking Up the Moral Universe" by John Authers (Bloomberg)
"The Coronavirus is Rewriting our Imaginations" by Kim Stanley Robinson (New Yorker)
Marginal Revolution (blog) by Tyler Cowen

Bourexit in the Time of Coronavirus

2020-03-20T11:17:00.003-04:00

Leaving Algeria after seven challenging, exhilarating, edifying, and unforgettable years was never going to be easy, but it sure wasn't supposed to go like this.

As I hinted previously, after extensive discussion last year Nina and I decided that we—along with our canine companions Bourek and Chorba, of course—would depart Algeria this spring. Our "Bourexit" was finally happening.

To decompress from all that life has thrown at us these last few years, we then planned to spend some months traveling before choosing where to resettle. We had held off on a honeymoon after our wedding in hopes of taking just such a trip, and now our chance had come. A few months of backpacking in Asia would be our last hurrah before a new chapter of oh-so-serious adulthood.

By early February, I had wrapped up my work with World Learning (while continuing to support the weekly broadcasts of "Andi Hulm", the reality TV show I host here) and turned to new projects, while Nina counted down her own last weeks at work. We aimed to leave Algiers around May 1, lugging our belongings and dogs to Germany, where we would stash them with Nina's family or friends before setting out for our highly anticipated sabbatical. We were already poring over guidebooks and debating which Laotian temples, Vietnamese noodle shops, Nepalese hiking routes, and Indonesian surf spots we would visit.

Needless to say, the coronavirus did not figure into our grand plan.

Like nearly everyone else on Planet Earth, we are still struggling to adapt to the disorienting news that lands each hour. Is it the end of the world, just an inconvenience, or something in between? Masks or no masks? Evacuate to Europe or hold fast in Algiers? With so little reliable information, making good decisions about anything these days feels impossible.

In a world suddenly flooded with doubt and confusion, all of us are grasping for shreds of certainty. I've found three:

1. Coronavirus is happening. Several days or weeks into this event (depending on your location), most of us still don't yet know exactly what it means for our lives, though all of us have already seen them upended, and are likely to experience much more disruption in the months ahead. The virus is also killing people, and looks certain to continue doing so. Many factors are complicating our response: an unavailability of effective testing or treatment, confusion around what prevention methods are or aren't effective, rampant rumors on social media, insufficient medical capacity worldwide, and less-than-competent leadership.

In the long run, by forcing everyone on the planet to question so much, we will emerge from this period much wiser, with new insights into public health, policymaking and governance, surveillance and privacy, our relationship with the environment, the moral responsibility each generation owes another, and so much more. But in the meantime it's messy and scary—as well as distracting. While we were all struggling to adjust to "social distancing", Trump bombed more Iranian targets in Iraq, Putin extended his rule until 2036, and China launched a massive public relations campaign to rewrite the Covid-19 pandemic story with itself as the savior, not the source.

Even when we return to "normal," our world will never be the same.

2. Bourexit is happening. Coronavirus or not, the time has come to seek new horizons and new challenges. We might not know when (the next few days, weeks, months?) but Nina and I are still leaving Algeria. Sadly, it seems likely that we will have to do so without hugging our many dear friends here farewell. We've also scrapped plans for a goodbye party and for trips to a last few touristic destinations in Algeria we hadn't yet explored. On top of it all, the logistics of an international move during a global pandemic are proving to be just as complicated as you might imagine.

It's not the ending I wanted for my time in Algeria, but I'll be leaving with so much more than I had when I arrived seven years ago: a wonderful wife and partner, two wildly entertaining dogs, and many dear memories of our time here.

3. My book is happening. I feel immensely privileged to have been able to discover this very isolated, unknown country—and to share images, encounters, and reflections from Algeria on my blog and social media along the way. But with time to think, time to write, and space for free expression all being in short supply, so far I have only managed to share a small fraction of what I have learned here. For that reason, I left my job earlier this year with plans to complete one big project before our travels: finally sitting down to write the book about Algeria that has been coalescing in my head for years.

After compiling years' worth of blog posts, drafts, and notes, last month I began writing and working with an editor. In the book, (working title: The Algerian Dream) I will focus on the youth of Algeria and all I have observed about the challenges they face, the creativity and energy they exhibit, and the potential they have to launch this country forward in exciting new ways. The arrival of the coronavirus proved highly disruptive but long hours of isolation in the weeks ahead should allow me to get back on schedule. I expect to publish around December 2020. Stay tuned for updates!

Wherever life takes us next, I intend to continue chronicling my story here on Ibn Ibn Battuta. Thank you all for reading, and please take care of yourselves and each other in these challenging times.

Tadrart: The Mystique of No Man's Land

2020-02-28T23:00:00.000-05:00

The Tadrart's vast expanses leave one plenty of space to ponder life's big questions.

What would your hometown look like without humans, without animals, without plants? What would remain if the land were stripped of life and abandoned to the vagaries of the elements? Wracked by winds, erosion, scorching heat and bitter cold, what would that once vibrant ground become as the centuries ticked by?

Among the peculiar pleasures of an extended desert excursion, several days' drive from the nearest cell phone tower, are plenty of silence and raw, open space to contemplate such questions—and to glimpse the likely answers firsthand.

In early January, Nina and I brought a dozen family and friends to one of the planet's most extreme environments: the remote Tadrart plateau.

Tucked deep in the Algerian Sahara, within the Tassili N'Ajjer National Park, the area is called the "Tadrart Rouge" because of its unique brick-red sand. No place on Earth more closely resembles Mars. But the extreme terrain isn't the only draw: scattered across this rugged landscape is one of the world's most splendid collections of prehistoric rock art.

Want to contemplate humanity's place in the universe, and perhaps even your own? You've come to the right spot.

Rise and shine: Saddling up for the day's adventures.

Our group included Nina's father Johannes, aunt Christa and uncle Mike, and cousin Nora from central Germany, plus two close friends from Berlin, Marja and Gunnar, our dear friend Karima from Algiers (serving as the trip's token Algerian), plus my sister Maggie all the way from snowy Boston. To round out our group of 15, a French friend from Algiers, Jacqueline, brought along her sister Claude and three friends, Patrick, Pierre, and Anissa, from Marseille.

To organize the expedition, we called upon our friend Ahmed Benhaoued from Admer Voyages, the same outfit that had guided our last visit to the region back in 2017 ("Illizi to Djanet Overland: The Lost World of Algeria's Tassili N'Ajjer"). That earlier trip had lasted barely more than two days, obliging us to stick to the vicinity of the main town, Djanet. Each time Ahmed had showed us a new site, eliciting many ooh's and ahh's, he would smile at me and say "This is nothing! Just wait until you see Tadrart!" After all Ahmed's goading, two years later we were back to call his bluff.

It turned out he wasn't bluffing.

A typical Tadrart vista: umber sand and a distant 4x4

Ten thousand years ago, the Sahara was covered in grassy savanna, dotted with lakes, and home to a mix of animals we now associate with the Serengeti. Erosion carved a plethora of natural arches and caves into the region's rocks, and prehistoric hunter-gatherers who roamed the area took shelter in those caves, covering the walls with vivid images of the animals all around them.

Desertification has long since driven much of the exotic megafauna southward, though not as long ago as you might imagine. The last lions were only chased out in the 1920s, and cheetah sightings still occur, though only rarely. As I wrote after our last visit, the desert only looks empty; in reality, it teems with life, albeit much of it small in size.

Yet the giraffes, gazelles, rhinoceros, fish, and elephants are still visible, carved or painted with elegant strokes on cave walls throughout the Tadrart Rouge (as well as the Tadrart Acacus, just next door in Libya). Some images show domestic animals too (cows, horses, and dogs) and even some early inscriptions in the Tifinagh (Berber) alphabet. In some images, hunters stalk prey; other scenes show only men doing battle, with the animals nowhere to be found.

Rock carving of giraffes, man, and other animals, plus Tifinagh and Arabic inscriptions

To reach the Tadrart, you must first reach Djanet, a three-hour flight south of Algiers, in the remote southeast corner of Algeria, beside the borders with Libya and Niger. (Thanks to the region's rough terrain and plenty of Algerian military outposts, it's still quite safe, even in this dodgy neighborhood.)

We landed around 4AM from Algiers, collected our bags, and headed straight into the desert, just a couple minutes' drive beyond the lights of the airport, to a spot where Ahmed and his team had pitched a ring of tents.

After a few hours' sleep, we woke, dressed, and ate. Breakfast was basic: baguettes (from a supply that grew more stale by the day, since there were no shops at which to replenish them) with synthetic approximations of cheese, butter, jam, and honey, plus hot drinks. On that front, options diverged widely: you could choose between instant coffee (surely modern society's most disappointing invention) or the Touareg guides' meticulously prepared, world-class sweet mint tea.

Once fed and packed, we loaded our gear into the backs of the guides' 4x4s and rolled out. We briefly rejoined the road—long enough to pass the iconic road sign south of town that gave each of us a visual reminder just how far we were from home:

South of Djanet, an iconic fork in the road

Soon after, we turned off the road—our last sight of pavement for four days—and onto the hard-packed piste. Soon we were racing through an otherworldly ocher terrain, dotted only by the occasional cluster of acacia trees.

We stopped at one of these little oases for lunch (salads, bread, tea) and a nap, then continued driving through ever more extreme landscapes, reaching the Oued In Djeran campsite shortly before dark. After hurriedly pitching our tents, we clambered across the nearby cliffs and canyons for a view of the sunset. Atop one rise, I found myself standing on a rock covered in the knobby stems of fossilized algae—a relic of the Sahara's past as the bed of a prehistoric sea.

At dusk, the temperature dropped precipitously (this being early January in the Sahara) so we bundled up and huddled under blankets around the campfire while Ahmed's team prepared dinner (a welcome series of hot stews). In honor of Johannes's 66th birthday, which happened to be that day, dessert was a plateful of madeleines, freed from their wrappers and smeared with not-quite-nutella, then topped with birthday candles. (Given the composition of our group, we sung "Happy Birthday" many times in many languages.)

After the meal, one of the cooks emerged with a guitar and played a selection of songs in Tamaheq (the Touareg's dialect of Berber/Tamazight), accompanied by his colleagues singing backup or thumping fists and cigarette lighters on plastic water jugs.

A nightly fireside concert in the desert, with Touareg tea

The next day we rose and did it all again, with plenty of stops along the way to examine rock art, hike slot canyons, share meals, and ogle bizarre rock formations (e.g., a massive arch in the approximate form of Algeria, a rock shaped like a hedgehog).

My favorite part of each day was the early morning, when I would duck out of the tent just after sunrise to explore. All around each campsite, the dawn would reveal tracks of desert mice and other rodents, feral cats, and bat-eared fennecs—the stars of each night's silent, invisible hunt.

One morning I crossed a sea of sand dunes then scaled a colossal rock pillar, its dark-red rock crumbling into almost-purple chunks in my hand. Atop the pillar, the wind blew around me, briefly making my head swim. I sat, and a distant crow flapped over to inspect me. All I could hear as he approached, circled, then glided off was the pulsing swoosh-swoosh of his wings in the crisp desert air.

Dune conquerors

Between the many stops, we spent several hours each day in the car. (For a visual, check out this quick video I shot.) None of us had thought to bring music along, so our car spent all five days listening to a playlist of Ahmed's favorite Touareg blues tunes. The more we listened, the more the list seemed to dwindle, until I could have sworn we were listening to Imarhan's "Tahabort" on eternal repeat—not that that stopped us from clapping and ululating along.

Each evening, we would scramble to pitch our tents, then explore before dinner. At the Tin Merzouga camp (just 10 miles / 15 kilometers from the Libyan border), we scaled a towering red sand dune together, collapsing at the top while our leg muscles screamed. At Moul Naga, we crisscrossed row after row of perfect yellow dunes, following camel tracks or just finding a quiet spot to stare at the horizon and meditate.

One evening, the crew prepared tagella, the traditional Touareg bread made from just semolina, water, and a pinch of salt, then cooked directly in the sand, smothered under a layer of hot coals. Scraped of its sandy outer layer, broken into small chunks, and drenched in savory vegetable-and-mutton sauce, it was exquisite—and undoubtedly my favorite meal of the trip.

Preparing traditional tagella bread in the sand

Every night, the crew would sing their favorite local hits, the firelight flickering across their faces and the full moon illuminating the desert beyond in a dull, milky glow. (See a video I shot of one of their songs here.)

"More people should discover this," I whispered to Nina one evening as the nightly concert wound down. "Yeah," she agreed, "But can you imagine what it would look like if they did?"

Tragically, she's right. While we took care to pack up our trash, we weren't exactly practicing "leave no trace" camping; our own trip to Tadrart was enjoyable in part because of just how few others come here. (One look at the unsightly toll the New Year's festivities impose on Algeria's more popular, less remote desert destinations is enough to confirm just how bad it might get if more visited Tadrart.) Yet still, our guides feed their families off the region's meager tourism industry. Who's to say they don't deserve better?

One question leads to another. How can we balance our desire for progress with our need for survival? Can humanity coexist with the natural world around us, as we once did? Or, like parasites, will we continue to drive every other species steadily toward extinction? In a world of individuals, devoid of collective conscience or controls, what will keep us from doing so? How much longer until the desert overtakes all our homelands?

Deep in the barren, denuded wasteland of the steadily expanding Sahara, surrounded by the relics of our nameless ancestors, is a good place to ponder these questions. Though their names may be forgotten, those ancestors left traces of enduring beauty behind them. Will anyone survive to uncover our society's remains? And if they do, what will they find?

My Rolleiflex photos from our trip are available here: 2020 Rollei - Tassili and my Leica Q2 photos are available here: 2020.01 Q2 - Tassili.

Andi Hulm - I Have A Dream

2020-02-08T08:46:00.015-05:00

Click here to watch the promo clip for "Andi Hulm" / "I Have A Dream"

At last, the big day has finally arrived!

Tonight is the official premier of "Andi Hulm" ("عندي حلم" or "I Have A Dream"), Algeria's first entrepreneurship reality television show. I serve as the show's host, and thus have the surreal privilege of appearing in many of the show's promotional materials, sometimes sprinkled in fairy dust (see above). Who ever said all those years spent struggling through Arabic class wouldn't lead anywhere?

Across 10 episodes, the show tracks the progress of 60 young Algerian aspiring entrepreneurs as they complete a series of increasingly difficult, high-energy challenges. Along the way, jury members whittle down the group until just a few standout finalists—then one final grand prize winner—remain. As the stakes rise you will see numerous surprises, moments of ecstatic joy and profound disappointment, and much more.

With any luck, the show will earn a wide following here in Algeria and spark greater discussion about the prospects young Algerians face as they work to realize their dreams in life. That's the hope, at least, of the show's creators at the US Embassy in Algiers, along with project partners World Learning, the American Chamber of Commerce in Algeria, and Wellcom Advertising. It was also the hope that motivated me and everyone else involved to persevere through four exhausting weeks of filming last fall, and through the many months of work required before and after in order to reach this day. We hope you watch and enjoy.

"Andi Hulm" will air nationwide in Algeria tonight, February 8 at 21:30 on Ennahar TV, and at the same time every Saturday thereafter for 10 weeks (with reruns each Tuesday at 3pm). For viewers outside the country, stay tuned here to watch online each week. (The show is primarily in Algerian Arabic but the online videos will include English subtitles.)

For more background, see "Andrew Here, Announcing "Andi Hulm'" and "New Reality TV Show Will Support Up-and-Coming Entrepreneurs in Algeria", Arab Studies Certificate Alum Hosts Algerian TV Show, or watch the show's trailer here:

UPDATE: Full episodes with English subtitles are now below, and available in this YouTube playlist. Enjoy!

Episode 1 (Holiday Inn) is now available here:

Episode 2 (Holiday Inn) is now available here:

Episode 3 (Holiday Inn) is now available here:

Episode 4 (PMG) is now available here:

Episode 5 (Pizza Hut) is now available here:

Episode 6 (Eli Lilly) is now available here:

Episode 7 (PPG) is now available here:

Episode 8 (Berlitz) is now available here:

Episode 9 (YAssir) is now available here:

Episode 10 (Cisco / Holiday Inn), the Grand Finale, is now available here:

Give Me a Home Where the Buffalo Roam, and the Deer and the Antelope Play

2020-02-07T20:05:00.000-05:00

With every passing year I spend away from the US, I feel the psychological distance grow, stretching to match the physical distance a bit more. Sometimes it's nice to return home and soak up a little Americana.

So for our longest vacation of 2019, Nina and I decided to spend ten days in August in Colorado catching up with my uncle Chris, aunt Kari, and cousin Mitch.

Back when I lived in DC in my 20s, my uncle, an avid outdoorsman, had invited me several times to spend July 4th weekend with their friends and family at a campground on the shore of Turquoise Lake, deep in the Rocky Mountains. I have fond memories of campfire stories with my cousins, and of hikes up to pristine high-mountain lakes in search of cutthroat trout. (See "Turqoise to Timberline: Chasing Trout in the Rockies")

More recently, Chris and Kari bought a small property near the town of Granby, just over two hours' drive from their home in suburban Denver. Ever since, my uncle had been pressing me to come back for another visit. As he well knew, I could only open my phone so many times to find an unsolicited snapshot of snow-capped mountains or sparkling streams before I caved.

While my mom and sister Maggie flew in from the east coast, Nina and I reached Denver via Montreal (for reflections from our long layover there, see "Much To Love in MTL"). We spent a day in Denver acclimating to the thinner atmosphere (they don't call it the "Mile High City" for nothing) and sampling the local Tex-Mex specialties, then headed into the hills.

Colorado's population has boomed in the last few decades, with much of the growth concentrated on the front range of the Rocky Mountains, in the Fort Collins-Boulder-Denver-Colorado Springs axis. That boom has brought new development to the mountains too, but compared to where I grew up the area still feels relatively empty.

The highway narrowed to just a two-lane road as it climbed westward, following a creek through former silver mining towns, their boom years long behind them. We spotted patches of snow—still clinging to the highest slopes in August—while crossing the continental divide at Berthoud Pass (elevation 11,307 ft / 3,446m). Traversing the high-mountain meadows, we passed ranches, the occasional general store, and signs for nearby ski resorts and cannabis dispensaries. (Colorado legalized recreational marijuana usage six years ago.)

Chris and Kari's place was at Ouray Ranch, a private plot straddling the Colorado River. Technically theirs was a condo, connected to a small cluster of neighbors' homes, but inside it felt like a cabin, all finished in rustic wood, with a cozy fireplace. From the back porch, we could peer through a gap in the aspen trees to watch ospreys fish in the river below. "Andrew, there goes your trout, man," my uncle would joke whenever a bird winged skyward with a fish wriggling in its talons. "Now you aren't gonna catch a darn thing in the morning."

Mitch's identical twin brother Noah passed away in a car crash several hours west of here in 2015, aged just 19. Noah was tender, fun-loving, just starting to turn the corner into adulthood. The first years after he passed, his absence was an ever-present heaviness, a visible and unfathomable burden for his parents and brother.

On this trip I noted that something subtle had changed. Noah didn't feel so much like an absence, but instead more like an extra presence, someone who I didn't expect to encounter there but whose memory still weaves in and out of so many conversations, or comes to mind when a gaze drifts to an empty chair at the far end of the dinner table. These days, that memory is as likely to bring a smile as it is a long face.

Noah hadn't known this place, which my aunt and uncle bought and renovated in just the last few years, but all agreed he would have loved it.

Coloradans lead the nation in activity levels, and there is no shortage of outdoor adventures all around. Thanks to my aunt's many helpful recommendations, we managed to pack our trip full of activities.

Twice during the trip we whitewater rafted down frigid snowmelt rivers—even getting my mom in the boat for one trip, which was an adventure in itself! We took long hikes around the local lakes, enjoyed cocktails on the porch of the Grand Lake Lodge, and drove into Rocky Mountain National Park for hikes and moose-spotting. We ended up seeing half a dozen of them, including a massive bull right by the roadside. Perhaps an even better highlight of the park was the drive along Trail Ridge Road (America's highest paved road, reaching an elevation of 12,183 ft / 3,713 m) and view of the mountaintops' extreme ecology, with stunted plants, brilliant lichens, and chubby marmots.

Nina and I also signed up one morning for a horseback ride through the aspen forests. The ride was led by a cowboy from Utah—the real kind who walks bow-legged and works on cattle ranches—who did a double-take when he heard where we were visiting from. ("Ayyylgeria huh?")

I even did my best to compete with the ospreys, joining my uncle for multiple fly fishing outings on the Colorado River. Not equipped with waders, I plowed into the icy water in jeans and hiking boots each time, cursing the cold until my feet went numb. The fishing started slowly but before long we landed on the right flies and technique, and began hauling in respectable numbers of rainbow and brown trout.

Unless you're a bird of prey, the fishing at Ouray Ranch is catch-and-release only, so we grilled on the porch each evening or drove into nearby Granby for more Tex-Mex. (If one measures the trip by how much Tex-Mex we managed to consume—as I'm often accused of doing—then it was a resounding success.) We did our best to sample all the locally brewed beers (Avalanche Amber Ale being my favorite) while the mosquitoes sampled us. (They were a particularly hungry variety, I discovered, that would happily bite you through your clothes.)

Nina loved it all, but then again, she also loved simple things like our visits to the local grocery stores, where she wandered the aisles alone, wide-eyed. America can be an overwhelming place if you haven't spent much time there before.

To close the trip, Mitch gave Nina, Maggie, and me a quick tour of downtown Denver, then we took in a concert (John Butler Trio, Yonder Mountain String Band, KT Tunstall) at Red Rocks, the gorgeous outdoor amphitheater in the foothills outside Denver.

For me, this perfect trip was a reminder of how rugged and gorgeous the American West can be, and of just how comfortable life there can be, with the wilds all but tamed and the frontier all but faded.

With warmest thanks to my uncle Chris, aunt Kari, cousin Mitch (and cousin Noah in spirit).

My Rolleiflex photos from our Colorado trip are available here: 2019 Rollei - Colorado, and my Leica Q2 photos are available here: 2019.08 Q2 - Colorado.

Much To Love in MTL

2020-02-04T08:43:00.000-05:00

Dépanneur: Even for French speakers, visiting Montreal can expand one's vocabulary and horizons alike.

Spend enough time in the francophone world and you hear lots of hype about Montreal.

Nina had never visited Canada, and both my previous visits had come amid blistering December weather, so while en route from Algiers to a week in the mountains of Colorado last summer, we slipped in a 36-hour layover in Canada's second city.

Visiting in August sure beats the winter. Back in 2013 I had spent a few days in Montreal shuttling an Algerian study mission between meetings—and did my best not to leave the network of tunnels underlying the city's downtown. On this trip, by contrast, we wore shorts and t-shirts and spent all day crisscrossing the city, strolling from trendy brunch spots in the Vieux Port to street markets in Chinatown to an outdoor art expo in the Gay Village. We scarfed a massive platter of poutine (the local delicacy, if you can call it that) from La Banquise, on the Plateau, and tried maple-syrup-flavored coffee, ice cream, and more.

Montreal was covered with exquisite street art and filled with gourmet boutiques. But more than anything else there were restaurants—seemingly more per square mile than anywhere I've ever been. "Does anyone eat at home in this city?" Nina wondered aloud as we walked past yet another block of nothing but fusion cafés,
French-style brasseries, Korean barbecues, world-famous bagel shops, and trendy bistros.

The city was also remarkably cosmopolitan, filled with speakers not just of English and the (almost incomprehensibly) twangy local French but also Vietnamese, Spanish, Portuguese—and even Algerian Arabic. Estimates vary but there are tens of thousands of Algerians in Montreal, which is sometimes called Canada's "Little Maghreb." The Algerians there are numerous enough that they regularly hold their own hirak protests in solidarity with those that began last winter in Algiers. It's hard to find anyone back in Algiers who doesn't have a cousin or two in Montreal, and many of our Algerian friends have worked or studied in Montreal themselves. While exploring, we encountered more than a few couscous restaurants (but needless to say, our appetites led us elsewhere).

Worldly Montreal is iconic of Canada's diverse population and the ethos that produced it; one in five Canadians today was born abroad. The country's openness to immigration has led to an economic and cultural flourishing and sharpened the contrast with its southern neighbor, which seems more seized by self-destructive nativism by the day.

If, as I wrote on my last visit to Montreal, the US is never far from many Canadians' minds, the implicit comparison must look increasingly pleasing to them the further we Americans drift from our founding ideals. Let's put it this way: if I were looking to move back to North America anytime soon, a place that leans into its diversity like Montreal does would be at the top of my list.

My Leica Q2 photos from Montreal are available here: 2019.08 Q2 - Montreal.

Glimpses of London on the Eve of Brexit

2020-01-30T23:00:00.000-05:00

For many visitors, London's authentically local sites pale in comparison to the multicultural imports.

After a torturous 3.5-year saga, the fateful day has finally arrived: Brexit is here. Tomorrow will be the United Kingdom's last day in the European Union; after 47 years of integration, it's back to "splendid isolation"—with all the tradeoffs, missed opportunities, and problems (bafflingly invisible to some) that it will entail.

By this point, most Europeans I know have long since settled on "good riddance." The Brits, by contrast, remain a bitterly divided bunch.

Nina and I have taken two trips to London in the past year or so, visiting this past New Year's and around Christmas a year earlier (my first time back since a trip during college in 2005). Both visits were brief and we spent most of our time catching up with American expat friends rather than pestering the locals about politics. However, my British friends around the world (a very non-representative, cosmopolitan sample) have spent the past few years feeling universally horrified at—yet powerless to stop—their country's willing self-destruction.

Britain won't be weighing anchor and shoving off further into the Atlantic tomorrow, of course. It will still depend on Europe for most of its trade. (And what's so bad
about that anyway?) If the British felt fed up by "unelected bureaucrats" in Brussels setting the terms on that trade and the goods exchanged, the conceit that they will somehow obtain better terms by ceding their seat at the table is utterly perplexing. But don't expect the nativists who voted for secession to care; they weren't even phased by the revelation, earlier this month, that the losses inflicted by Brexit will soon surpass the full value of the UK's 47 years of EU contributions.

During our visits we stayed with our generous American friends Joe and Christianne, and didn't come away with any particularly novel Brexit insights, other than firsthand confirmation of the obvious: London is a strikingly cosmopolitan city, and thus is likely to suffer the impact of Brexit disproportionately. Whereas residents of the English countryside and second-tier cities might maintain the illusion that the country can thrive independently of the world around it, London is inescapably plugged in. We walked the streets past gaggles of pouty-lipped khaleeji princesses, attended a Danish-Icelandic artist's exhibit, ate at sumptuous Chinese and Indian restaurants, and heard speakers of Russian and Arabic and Malay and so much more. Sure, the pubs are alright and the little red phone booths are cute for about a minute, but who really goes to the UK for the purely British attractions? Some people, presumably, but not us.

As the UK flees Europe, shunning a globalized, open future in favor of a return to imagined glory days of "sovereignty", it's likely to instead rediscover a less illustrious past, the one that defined it for far longer than its relatively brief moment at the center of the world: that of a few cold, rocky islands, isolated in the North Atlantic and buffeted by strange forces from beyond the horizon.

My Rolleiflex photos from London are available here: 2018 Rollei - London, and my Leica Q2 photos are available here: 2020.01 Q2 - London.

Snow Devils Lurk and Daredevils Soar in an Alpine Wonderland

2020-01-26T08:29:00.000-05:00

Filzmoos's traditional winter Perchten festival dates back centuries.

These days, feats of glory rarely go unrecorded. But on this chilly night high in the Austrian Alps, while Markus arced gracefully through the sky, our cell phones failed us.

For Nina and me, it was the last night of a five-day stay with Markus, his girlfriend Vroni, and his parents at their chalet in the little alpine town of Filzmoos. Eager to make the most of our final day, we had skied since just after dawn—not as early as it might sound, this being winter in central Europe, but early enough to give us over six uninterrupted hours of blazing trails through the deep powder that had fallen steadily during our entire stay.

That evening we had only returned to the cabin well after darkness fell, after closing the day with our usual ritual: We would take one last gondola ride up to the mountain's frigid, windswept peak then, amid the murky dusk and driving flakes, we would glide half by sight, half by feel over the moguls to the lights of the nearest ski hut. Having skipped lunch to maximize our skiing time, there we would dig enthusiastically into some of the doughy, buttery local delights we had
discovered on this, our first visit to Austria. Nina could easily pronounce the names of the dishes (though she giggled at the funny mountain twist on her native German) but I focused more on the task at hand, washing down one plateful after another with tall flagons of beer.

Our good friend Markus and his family hosted us for the week.

We would follow the meal with more beer, plus local pine schnapps and game after game of Nageln, or "nailing" (the double-entendre exists in German, too, I learned). In this traditional mountain game, two players pass a hammer back and forth, taking turns trying to whack a nail into a tree stump with the hammer's narrow rear blade. The loser drinks. (Depending on the player, the feat either grows harder or easier the more schnapps one downs.)

Finally, bellies full and heads abuzz, we would trundle back out into the gale, fish our skis out from the snow bank, and strap in for the day's final, reckless ride down the mountain. Nina, a cautious beginner even in daylight ("This body is a temple, I have to protect it"), picked her way gingerly down the mountain behind the rest of us, cursing me for ever signing her up for such foolishness.

The night before, New Year's Eve, we had returned home to eat raclette and drink champagne with Markus's parents, then staged an impromptu family photo shoot in traditional Austrian outfits.

On New Year's Eve, I broke out the Rolleiflex for a photoshoot in traditional garb.

The night before that had been the midnight torch run, organized by Filzmoos's ski patrol. Markus, a former ski patrol member, had talked his old comrades into letting him join them—while bringing his American friend along to boot. We worked our way down the darkened mountain over several hours, pausing for rounds of schnapps, Nageln, and traditional songs at each ski hut along the way. All of us were skiing tipsy by the time the town's lights came into view. We were issued torches and hasty instructions on how to zig-zag in an interlocking weave pattern down the hill's final pitch, while the residents of Filzmoos regarded the spectacle from below. Blinking back the schnapps haze, I drew on the many, many minutes of ski lessons I had accumulated throughout my life and managed to avoid the injury or embarrassment of a fiery crash.

The preceding night had been capped by sledding, and our first night in the town by Filzmoos's winter Perchten, a centuries-old torchlight parade in which town residents parade in handmade wood-and-fur masks and body suits intended to scare away evil winter spirits. The costumes, which were elaborate and more than a little bit horrifying, can reportedly cost thousands of euros to make and are passed down through families for generations. Only in Markus's company would we ever have managed to see such a sight, which is well off the traditional tourist routes.

Perchten mask

Markus had also done well by us in Vienna, where we had begun our trip with his enthusiastic tour of the city's best sights and eateries. The schnitzel and pies were as delicious as promised, the downtown shops just as elegant, the museums just as grand and fascinating. I even got the chance to stop in and see one of my photos that was on exhibit at the Weltmuseum.

But until the day I die, the image that will be burned into my memory from our trip to Austria was Markus's ski jump.

Back to that cold winter's night on the hillside beside his family's cabin: Markus had a plan, and enlisted us to shovel snow for hours in the wind and cold. Already sore from successive days of skiing, he and I shoveled until our arms and backs burned, while Nina and Vroni molded and packed snow according to his specifications. Even his mother came out and supervised the works for a spell. As the jump grew higher, Markus climbed the hill above, carving out a narrow chute on the slope. After more packing, a final inspection determined the jump to be sound, and Markus grabbed his skis.

At the top of the hill, he strapped in and, without a word of warning, suddenly leapt and swiveled his ski tips down the steep slope. As we scrambled back, fumbling in vain for our cell phones, Markus blasted downhill.

We all sucked in a breath as he soared off the jump's edge, and time slowed to a crawl.

Christmas decorations in downtown Vienna

Markus arced upward—three, four, five meters above the roadway far below. Knees and skis locked together, arms outstretched, he held perfect form: a picture of grace suspended in the darkness. And then... he began to tip backward, little by little, then faster still. Arms windmilled, a shout rang out, but nothing could be done. By the time he landed in the massive snowbank on the opposite side of the road, just an instant after it had all begun, Markus was perfectly inverted; he pierced the snow headfirst, like a glorious alpine lawn dart.

Seconds later, we had fished him out—though the snow was packed deep into his every orifice, he was otherwise miraculously, impossibly unharmed. Spitting snow, he assured us he was fine, then sputtered, "Did you guys get that on video?!"

Our phones could never have captured the moment's beauty as well as memory could anyway.

With heartfelt thanks to the entire Haas family for their generous hospitality.

My Rolleiflex photos from Austria are available here: 2018 Rollei - Austria.

The streets of Vienna at Christmastime