Smile of the Day
It's been a lousy day all things considered - with the official announcement of the Morsy-Shafeeq run-off, but the comic relief was that a nice hacker broke into the Muslim Brotherhood Twitter accounts, and changed [...]
May 2012
Egyptian Elections, Game of Thrones Edition
A guide of the Egyptian elections and its main protagonists, explained for Game of Thrones fans. The comparisons are of course very approximate, I am not familiar with the books and it’s the first [...]
Tunisia Stakes a Claim
Update: Someone translated this article into French for Slate Afrique: La Tunisie, nouveau modele Arabe? Summary: Tunisia is beginning to assert its leadership role in the Arab world, backed by its revolutionary credentials and buoyed [...]
A bitter presidential vote
Long story short: I voted. And I hated it. Crossposted at Foreign Policy Magazine: Transitions. A BITTER PRESIDENTIAL VOTE Yes, that's totally me. My hand is white now. I ticked the ballot, dropped it [...]
Travels
Dear readers - apologies for the long silence! It's been an exhausting and exciting couple of weeks. I'm wrapping up my current consultancy in Tunisia, and it's exciting as the product I've been working on - [...]
April 2012
“Tunis Reads” as Tunisians reclaim their public space
I forgot to post this one! Crossposted on Foreign Policy Transitions. Last Wednesday, hundreds or perhaps thousands of people took over Habib Bourguiba Avenue, Tunisia's revolutionary epicenter. Not to protest the prime [...]
Curtain falls on the Daily News Egypt.
I am certainly not worried about the Daily News Egypt journalists: they are an exceptionally talented group of people, and for them, the sky is the limit. I am however sad for the disappearance of [...]
When Egypt was a Nubian Country: The Pyramids of Meroe
[Note: Today is 'Blog about Nubia' day, marking the expulsion of entire Nubian villages in 1964 to make way for Lake Nasser. (here's a short video in Arabic). This unpublished travel/politics article was written a [...]
More disqualified candidates: elections make even less sense now
Crossposted on Foreign Policy Magazine: Transitions blog. Egypt's presidential elections will take place less than four weeks from now and we still don't know who's running. As I've said before in this column (this sentence [...]
Amr Mohamed, the Nerdy Teenager I wanted to become
He got more coverage than Mohamed Sanad but still much less than he deserves. In case you haven't heard: Amr Mohammed won the Youtube Spacelab contest to design an experiment to be implemented in [...]