Philip Gourevitch
Philip Gourevitch
Philip Gourevitch, an American author and journalist, is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a former editor of The Paris Review. His most recent book is The Ballad of Abu Ghraib, an account of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison under the American occupation. He became widely known for his first book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, which tells the story of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide...
bad good villain
He's a villain who doesn't need to be vilified. He does it himself, ... He wanted to be a very good bad guy.
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Look around. It's harder and harder to find good fiction in mainstream magazines. I want this magazine to appeal to people interested in longform writing. This is anti-blog. It's writing worth the investment of time.
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I can't imagine trying to second guess what George Plimpton would do, ... The magazine has this tremendous tailwind moving it along, but there also has to be room to reconnect to a new time. These new articles will have a distinctive flavor and will address themselves to the world at large.
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Administration officials took to telling reporters that Washington was contributing to a public-health initiative in Uganda to clean up more than ten thousand Rwandan corpses from the shores of Lake Victoria.
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These interviews were truly like nothing I had read before, ... On the other hand, they reminded me of everything from Studs Terkel to Bertolt Brecht. They offer a funny, weird glimpse of how Chinese society works.
memories evil holocaust
The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.
tyrants evil social-justice
Denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.
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The piled-up dead of political violence are a generic staple of our information diet these days, and according to the generic report all massacres are created equal: the dead are innocent, the killers monstrous, the surrounding politics insane or nonexistent...The anonymous dead and their anonymous killers become their own context. The horror becomes absurd.
war thinking europe
I'm not pro-war. But I think war has been the dominant condition of humankind, and peace has been the anomaly - certainly sustained periods of peace that profit great masses of people - and I think war has worked, even awful hellish wars: worked to staunch fascist aggression in Europe, worked to preserve the Union after secession in the United States, etc. Not always, maybe not often, but to say never is to reject history in favor of a wishful unreality.
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Political corruption is to Rhode Islanders as smog is to people who live in Los Angeles: nobody complains of its absence, but when it rolls around everyone feels right at home.
ideas people political
What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the crime.
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Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building.
ethnicity order issues
In 1933-34, the Belgians conducted a census in order to issue ‘ethnic’ identity cards, which labelled every Rwandan as either Hutu (85%) of Tutsi (14%) or Twa (1%). The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis, and permitted the Belgians to perfect the administration of an apartheid system rooted in the myth of Tutsi superiority… Whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have stood for in the pre-colonial state no longer mattered; the Belgians had made ‘ethnicity’ the defining feature of Rwandan existence.
rhode-island islands political
Mike Stanton is our preeminent aficionado and raconteur of Rhode Island’s flamboyantly criminal political follies, and The Prince of Providence is the chronicle of a great American rogue, Mayor Buddy Cianci—a paragon of charisma and corruption.