In a year of sorrow, pain, and disaster, a turn toward interactive art can serve as a sanctuary
2020 has been a complete clusterfuck. There is no way around that, and I suspect there really isn’t a more succinct way to put it, really. I know it’s been a clusterfuck for everyone, seeing as how there was this slobber-knocker of a virus that decided to upend the lives of billions, and unfortunately take millions away from us far too early. In the United States, we’ve faced a wildly inconsistent government response and a woefully inadequate support-system to boot, and we celebrated Easter, Ramadan, Passover, and Hannukah, and Christmas with socially distanced mechanisms. …
Wallahi!? An American tv show for Arabs and Muslims, by Arabs and Muslims? Alhamdulillah!
So, being a Muslim, or even just an Arab-American in the United States, especially after September 11th, 2001 is just….incredibly hard, right? That’s not really new information. We face discrimination and suspicion at every turn, are relentlessly questioned both implicitly and explicitly with regard to our “loyalty”, and are expected to disavow all of our brothers and sisters in the Middle East in order to be deemed a “good” Muslim American.
As a result of this constant dynamic, the common depiction of a Muslim or Arab in American television and film often centers around two themes: jihadist terrorism and sexual…
There is no “clash of civilizations,” but the Ayatollah needs us to believe there is one.
On January 21st, 2020, I went onto one of my favorite and least favorite social media platforms: Twitter. I appreciate the platform because of its ability to make so many experts’ opinions readily accessible for consumption, however, I also dislike it because of its hyper-acceleration of information, making it oftentimes impossible to address falsehoods or narratives espoused that paint a picture of radical proportions. The latter is what I encountered on the 21st when I stumbled upon a tweet made by the spokesperson account of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei.
This tweet seems innocuous on the surface, after all, if you’re…
There are two constitutionally outlined mechanisms for the removal of a President, there is the well-known trigger of impeachment power that is bestowed upon the House to begin and the Senate to consider in a trial, and then there’s a lesser-known mechanism: the 4th section of the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
25th Amendment, Section 4 of the U.S Constitution:
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written…
Yaseen Al-Sheikh
occasionally writing
