September 22, 2015 edition

There is a city of fantasy that is divided. But maybe this is not so unusual. Every large city is divided.
On one level, living space is shaped by the wealthy; on another, the poor and the marginalized. On one side is the part that always wants to be on show, as scene; on the other, the part that wants to be hidden, the obscene.

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More Sidelines articles in other editions

September 15, 2015 edition

...and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral...
-W.H. Auden
That photo-that shocking photo, the one we can't bear to look at, the one we worry will make sensitive people the world over have nightmares-has quickly become the symbol of our current anxiety. The body of a small three-year-old boy lying facedown on the shore. His tiny, fragile forehead dipped in the waves that washed his body back up on Turkish soil. The blue of his shorts and the red of his t-shirt seem to be calling out to the entire Bodrum Peninsula.

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September 8, 2015 edition

The police found a truck abandoned in a remote Austrian village on the side of the highway between Vienna and Budapest. There was a putrid smell. Soon it became clear why: seventy-one rotting bodies were inside the truck. Corpses of migrants. They died most probably of suffocation, lack of oxygen where they were hiding or had been hidden, full of fear and hope that they could make it across Austria.
Doom has become routine in the lives of those who no longer have a homelandthose who travel great distances to change their fate. Just a few days before the truck was found in the village of Parndorf, 40 people were found dead in the Mediterranean, piled up in a boat that had left the coast of Libya five hours earlier headed for Italy. They had been killed by petrol fumes in the cramped, overheated engine room.

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September 1, 2015 edition

Science begins with a child's wonder.
Alfred Russell Wallace-the Englishman who together with Charles Darwin discovered the 'theory of evolution'-noted how, as a child, he had been fascinated watching bees. He found bees a marvel in every meadow, and thought anyone unfamiliar with them missed out on an endless source of enjoyment and fascination.

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August 25, 2015 edition

Revolution is never careful. There is no revolution carried out carefully, meticulously, and protected from going astray. Going astray is what revolution is about. Revolution does not set out to follow what has been laid out by the power that preceded it.
This is why August 17, 1945, was a revolutionary moment: on that morning the birth of a new country was declared. The rulers of the Netherlands Indies, so neat and repressive, had fallen. The Japanese military regime, so strong and cruel, had also lost. They were no more. Power relations in Indonesian changed radically.

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August 17, 2015 edition

1949: shortly after Indonesia arose with the euphoria of independence, Chairil Anwar wrote this line in one of his poems: "Life merely delays defeat."

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August 11, 2015 edition

In a sandy desert, a shepherd withdrew from a prophet's anger. In Jalaluddin Rumi's well-known storyfrom the MasnaviMoses hears a shepherd uttering a strange prayer: "Oh God, show me where Thou art, that I may become Thy servant. I will clean Thy shoes and comb Thy hair, and sew Thy clothes, and fetch Thee milk.".
Moses saw this passionate prayer as the seed of heathenism. To compare God to a person who needs milk was irreverent.

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