Capital New York

How the New York Film Academy discovered gold in the developing world

LAGOS—In his small corner of the film world, Ishaq Sidi Ishaq is a giant. His 2000 movie Wasila, released on videotape and distributed in the Hausa-language market of northern Nigeria, was a local blockbuster, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. It established a new cinematic style, drawing on Bollywood-inspired dance routines, and was one of the most influential Hausa films ever. Braving the disapproval of a devout Muslim culture, and working around sharia laws, Ishaq has gone on to produce an incredible number of movies. He can’t easily come up with an exact count, but he estimates around 120. More

Posted on April 16th, 2012 4:32pm

Courting the innovator-establishment at SXSW, where Obama vs. Romney doesn't work

AUSTIN—Working in politics for almost thirty years, as Mark McKinnon has, you learn how to size up an audience. When the Texan political strategist introduced himself at a South by Southwest Interactive panel discussion on the future of American political parties, he started off by drawling, “I’m for anything that’s disruptive.” More

Posted on March 14th, 2012 12:37pm

Romney's mustard base: A guide to South Carolina barbecue and the Republican primary

Once every four years, the state of South Carolina—first in the Confederacy, and first in the hearts of late-night comedy writers—becomes the object of frantic amateur anthropology. Natives know to brace themselves for the gale force of the clichés that blow into the state, along with the presidential candidates, as it prepares to hold its primary. More

Posted on January 18th, 2012 8:39am

Obama's half-brother writes a 'genuine' book about their father's life and untimely death

Barack Obama introduced himself to the world via a memoir entitled Dreams From My Father, so he can only blame himself for the public’s obsession with his many-branched family tree.

In his book, Obama portrayed his namesake, Barack Obama Sr., as an absent but nonetheless dominating presence in his life. Since his election as president, other works have filled in tragic, often damning, details about the late Kenyan economist and his treatment of his many far-flung offspring. More

Posted on December 2nd, 2011 5:10am

The Newt Doctrine: Candidate Gingrich and the heroic-leadership model of American foreign policy

Atop the copyright page of his first book, Window of Opportunity, Newt Gingrich placed a quote from Ronald Reagan’s then-recent first inaugural address: “We have every right to dream heroic dreams.”

This is a freedom Gingrich has indulged in with great enthusiasm—and sometimes damaging over-enthusiasm—throughout his three decades on the national stage. It is difficult to think of a serious modern presidential candidate who has written as prodigiously about the ideas that run through his head: more than a dozen books on policy alone, often revised and updated through multiple editions, and interspersed with a series of historical novels about great military conflicts. More

Posted on November 28th, 2011 8:45am

Up close, Michele Bachmann's secret-agent political organizer looked more like Elmer Gantry than James Bond

Peter Waldron, an evangelical minister who told the publication that he is doing outreach on Bachmann's behalf to the born-again community, spent more than a month in Kampala's Luzira Prison in 2006, and possesses a resume more in keeping with a spy novel than a presidential campaign. Among other things, the Atlantic item reports, Waldron is now promoting an autobiographical movie on his website that asks, teasingly, "was he a businessman, a preacher, a spy?" Franke-Ruta adds that "one man who knew Waldron in 2004 told The St. Petersburg Times in 2006 that Waldron had told him he used to work for the CIA."

I bring this up because I happen to be that man who knew Waldron. More

Posted on August 17th, 2011 6:25pm

War against Bin Laden ends not with a bang, but a twitter

We always wondered how we'd know when the war was over. The answer turned out to be, as we always intuited, when we matched his blood. We are told that the corpse had the right DNA, and surely we will soon see visual proof—a death portrait taken before he was cast into the sea. Some people will continue to doubt, of course, and will spin conspiracies of escape just as they did with Hitler. But for reasonable people, yesterday's events will surely mark an ending, and a new and resonant meaning for May Day. More

Posted on May 2nd, 2011 2:22pm

Was Barack Obama Sr. 'eased' out of Harvard, and America, for dating white women?

This morning, the Arizona Independent, a weekly paper, published the file kept by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (as the agency was then called) on a Kenyan student by the name of Barack Hussein Obama Sr. So far, the file, obtained via FOIA, has mostly gotten attention for further substantiating the obvious: that Obama Sr. fathered a son who was born in Hawaii. More

Posted on April 27th, 2011 2:51pm