Haroon Moghul

Musandam is Arabic for ‘the Hamptons.’

Much of the coverage of Turkey can be politely described as ‘trampoline journalism’—bounce into Taksim and bounce out. What I saw in Istanbul didn’t match the feverish descriptions that made it even onto the BBC or that clogged up my Twitter feed. More relevant to me, almost no one was interested in hearing from religious Turks. So I went ahead and talked to them.

Once you produce garbage, by your own logic we have the right to recycle what you have wasted all humanity’s energy to produce (in Man of Steel, Krypton goes to hell literally because they fracked their planet to death); you could say, then, that they turned their planet into a bomb and blew themselves up. How do we make sense of this otherwise? So I suggest Man of Steel as an exercise in the language of racism, the politics of dispossession, and the danger of too much power.