Peter Hessler's Blog, page 3

How Trump Is Transforming Rural America

In Colorado, the President���s tone has started rubbing off on residents.

Learning Arabic from Egypt���s Revolution

After the Arab Spring, lessons were a way to absorb language, culture, and politics.

Learning Arabic from Egypt’s Revolution

When you move to another country as an adult, the language flows around you like a river. Perhaps a child can immediately abandon himself to the current, but most older people will begin by picking out the words and phrases that seem to matter most, which is what I did after my family moved to Cairo, in October of 2011. It was the first fall after the Arab Spring; Hosni Mubarak, the former President, had been forced to resign the previous February. Every weekday, my wife, Leslie, and I met wi...

Egypt���s Failed Revolution

President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has unwittingly revealed more about his country���s political structures than anybody could have imagined.

Egypt’s Failed Revolution

The Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who came to power in a coup that, in its aftermath, resulted in the massacre of more than a thousand supporters of his predecessor, has a reputation for speaking very softly. This quality often disarms foreigners. “When you talk to him, unlike most generals, he listens,” a European diplomat told me recently. “He’s not bombastic.” An American official told me that Sisi reminds her of a certain Washington archetype. “You have the political people wh...

Making Peace with Trump���s Revolutionaries

Peter Hessler writes about a Donald Trump rally in Grand Junction, Colorado, and the ways in the which the state has gone from red to purple.

Making Peace with Trump’s Revolutionaries

On Tuesday, while driving to a Donald Trump rally in Grand Junction, Colorado, I pulled over when I saw a political sign that used the word “mulatto.” It was located in the town of Delta, on the west side of U.S. Route 550, at a former shopfront whose walls and marquee had been decorated with big-lettered messages:

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Egypt���s Singular Stay-at-Home Campaigns

Peter Hessler on a campaign in El-Balyana, with the candidates Yusuf Hasan Yusuf, Rafat Mohamed Mahmoud, and others.

Living-Room Democracy

This past fall in El-Balyana, a remote district in Upper Egypt, there were nineteen candidates for two seats in the new national parliament, and none of them seemed to enjoy the campaign more than Yusuf Hasan Yusuf. He was a big man in his mid-forties, with smooth, dark skin that was set off by a white galabia. He had nine children, a jewelry shop, and a farm where he grew wheat, corn, and sugarcane. He campaigned entirely door-to-door—in his opinion, public political activity served no purpo...

Invisible Bridges: Life Along the Chinese-Russian Border

In the summer of 2014, Davide Monteleone, an Italian photographer who had lived in Moscow for more than a decade, began to travel to the Russian-Chinese border in search of something that felt real and reliable. “I had been covering the uprising in Ukraine, and then the civil war and the occupation of Crimea,” he told me. “I was disturbed by how hard it was to remain neutral when there was so much press attention. I felt like whatever I did was going to be used for propaganda. So I thought ab...