Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

Entries Tagged as 'France'

The Accidental Challenge

July 9th, 2012 · Comments Off on The Accidental Challenge

The French photographer Marc Garanger, best known for his 1960 series on Algerian women, began his career while serving in the army. He was assigned to Algiers in 1960, right as France was beginning to accept that the jewel of its North African empire was fated to achieve independence. The inevitably of this outcome caused […]

Share

[Read more →]

Tags:···

The Popular Cannon

December 7th, 2011 · 5 Comments

This blog has occasionally featured my half-baked ruminations on the symbolic power of tangible objects. I’ve always been puzzled by the extraordinarily high values that people can ascribe to non-personal items, as if those items’ absence or destruction might somehow affect the intangible ideas they embody. A great case in point is the developing spat […]

Share

[Read more →]

Tags:·····

The Empty File

August 17th, 2011 · Comments Off on The Empty File

As part of my ongoing, book-related effort to gain a better understanding of the Vietnam War, I recently started diving into the documentary series based on Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History. (Yeah, I know, I should’ve started with the source material—my bad.) I’ve found the first episode particularly enlightening, since part of my book will […]

Share

[Read more →]

Tags:······

The Utter Mess in New Caledonia

August 10th, 2011 · Comments Off on The Utter Mess in New Caledonia

British Prime Minister David Cameron can take some small measure of solace in the fact that his government is the only one in Europe to be vexed by violent protestors. His French counterparts are suffering through similar civil unrest, though with an asterisk: the nation’s pocket of trouble is located several thousand miles away from […]

Share

[Read more →]

Tags:···

The Grim Handiwork of Man

February 1st, 2011 · 2 Comments

In researching my Teddy Weatherford yarn for The Atavist, I was compelled to revisit a tragic event that I described in Now the Hell Will Start: the Bengal famine of 1943, which ultimately claimed the lives of 3 million Indians. In the book, I detail how a bare modicum of foresight could have prevented the […]

Share

[Read more →]

Tags:······

The Small Pleasures of Camel Meat

August 3rd, 2010 · 7 Comments

Last week I chimed in about the seemingly never-ending quest to bring deposed Chadian dictator Hissène Habré to justice. To add to that sad story, it’s worth remembering how Habré first gained international notoriety: the 1974 kidnapping of French archaeologist Francoise Claustre, who was held for nearly three years before gaining her release through the […]

Share

[Read more →]

Tags:·····

Is Mili Spelin

April 23rd, 2010 · 2 Comments

Much love to Nicolas Sarkozy for showing off his language-geek credentials at a Parisian environmental conference. A less astute world leader might’ve taken the easy way out by namechecking Esperanto in an attempt to describe a United Nations draft treaty as difficult to parse. But Sarkozy dug much deeper into the linguistic crates, citing the […]

Share

[Read more →]

Tags:·····

Against Ivan Barleycorn

January 21st, 2010 · Comments Off on Against Ivan Barleycorn

More than we might care to admit, cultures are defined by their attitudes toward alcohol consumption. And so it makes sense that amateur anthropologists can learn a lot by paying attention not only to consumption habits, but to the psychological tactics that societies use to scare folks away from Demon Rum. Those tactics are on […]

Share

[Read more →]

Tags:·······

Severely Burnt French Toast

July 9th, 2009 · 7 Comments

We’re on a Wired deadline this afternoon, so we’re gonna outro early with a classic hoops clip: a young Vince Carter absolutely posterizing French center/stiff Frédéric Weis. Yes, we realize you’ve seen it before; trust us, it’s worth a second (or tenth) look, if only for the confused expression on Weis’s face at the end […]

Share

[Read more →]

Tags:···

Old-School Strongman Sheds Mortal Coil

June 8th, 2009 · 3 Comments

Microkhan is big enough to admit when we were wrong. And so we must eat a bit of humble pie regarding Gabonese president Omar Bongo, who apparently wasn’t faking his illness. Last month, we opined that the timing of Bongo’s medical leave seemed curiously perfect, given that he was under French investigation. Given Bongo’s horrendously […]

Share

[Read more →]

Tags:·····

Department of Odd Timing

May 18th, 2009 · 4 Comments

After 42 years at the helm of Gabon, President Omar Bongo appears to be easing his way out the door. The official reason is declining health, but Microkhan finds it odds that Bongo seems to have taken ill after a French court lowered the investigative boom, in response to a complaint by Transparency International. The […]

Share

[Read more →]

Tags:······

When the Disease Beats the Cure

May 11th, 2009 · 5 Comments

Last night, Microkhan finally got around to completing the Stanley Kubrick circuit by watching Paths of Glory. Suffice to say that the film is a potent reminder of the World War I’s absolute ghastliness; we can scarcely imagine what it must have been like to be an 18-year-old lad in the trenches, ordered to venture […]

Share

[Read more →]

Tags:······