VQR Online

Portraits of Ex-Prisoners of Egypt’s Emergency Law

I want you to know that the first time I did anything, I just wanted them to suffer some easily remedied discomfort. I didn’t care that Tusker, too, would have to suffer for as long as the others did: a whole day before I recommended the...

No one—neither Libyans nor those of who claimed to know Libya well—saw the second revolution coming. For Libyans these daily conversations were a means of moral survival; they never truly believed that the changes of which they dreamt would...

We have gone through
so many revisions of the prelude
that we no longer know

Egyptian protests began on January 25, 2011, spurred in part by the success of protests in Tunisia and brought to a boil by a massive social media campaign. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were so effective in getting Egyptians out onto the...

A faith healer has brought hope to hundreds of thousands—but he has also convinced them to abandon HIV medication.

Admit coming upon the fallen horse at evening,
now asleep but withered, now reducing as you near, now

Just as the World Food Program charter plane en route to Nairobi sped along the dirt airstrip to its lifting speed and began its ascent, I looked down at the sprawl of white tents and clusters of globular huts below where I had just spent a...

Crucifixes crowbarred from the apses
left their shadows, faint or imagined:
a false translation, like the Bibles

missionaries stacked along the driveway.

[…]