Ten years after the bombing of Baghdad and the start of the Iraq war, Seymour Hersh asks, what’s up with our Constitution? “How could a small group of hard-line conservatives around President Bush… so quickly throw us over the cliff? It’s not enough to blame it on the fear, anger, and confusion brought on by the 9/11 attacks… Is our Constitution that fragile?” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/ZBToV5

Photograph by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum. See more images from “Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq.”

This week in the magazine, Jeffrey Toobin writes a Profile of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who even before her time on the Supreme Court played an important role in shaping the legal framework for women’s rights and gender discrimination. Here Toobin and Margaret Talbot talk with Amy Davidson about Ginsburg’s legacy and some of the current issues the Court is addressing. Also, fiction from a veteran of the war in Afghanistan.  Click-through to listen now: http://nyr.kr/15sjBe5

   Read “Kattekoppen,” this week’s fiction by Will Mackin, about one soldier’s experience as a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan: http://nyr.kr/15WX5eh In this Q&A, Mackin, who as an officer in the Navy has been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, discusses his story, the difficulties of writing about traumatic events, and how he feels about others’ attempts to represent the war in fiction and film: http://nyr.kr/15sjBup

Dexter Filkins on why the “non-combat” distinction is meaningless given the nature of our recent wars: “In the twelve years since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, the military has been steadily pushing women into jobs that no one could call ‘non-combat’ without stripping the phrase of its meaning…” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/10SsrlV

(Source: newyorker.com)

Last week, the photographer and filmmaker Mikhail Galustov took The New Yorker’s Instagram feed with him around Kabul, Afghanistan, where he is based. (In October, we published a slide show of Galustov’s Afghan faces.) “I wanted to focus on the side of Kabul that rarely makes it on the pages of news outlets,” he told me. “It’s a very special moment in the life of the city; there is an enormous development effort that many find controversial. The upcoming elections and withdrawal of foreign troops make the future look uncertain. Twelve years of intensive foreign investment have created shopping malls, districts of new housing, paved roads, jobs, and a group of nouveau riche that benefitted from the international attention.” Click-through for a selection of favorites from the feed: http://nyr.kr/UxQJuI

This week, continuing with our Instagram Takeover series, the Afghanistan-based photographer Mikhail Galustov is posting from Kabul. His first photo, above, shows teen-agers hanging out on the wreckage of a Soviet personnel carrier on top of Wazir Akbar Khan hill, overlooking Kabul. Follow @newyorkermag on Instagram for updates. 

Since 1973, seven out of the past nine Afghan Presidents have taken power in Kabul in non-peaceful ways. Steve Coll talks with former Afghan Defense Minister and leader of a coup against his President, Shahnawaz Tanai, and discovers “some of the texture— the human quality— of an attempted Afghan coup d’etat”: http://nyr.kr/TuTBLg

Photograph by Robert Nickelsberg/Time Life Pictures/Getty.

On Wednesday evening, the Magnum photographer Peter van Agtmael accepted the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant for Humanistic Photography in a ceremony at the School of Visual Arts. The grant is awarded to support and encourage a photographer working in the spirit of the legendary photojournlaist, and van Agtmael plans to use the thirty-thousand-dollar grant to build on “Disco Night September 11,” his ongoing project on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their consequences in the United States. “As an American of the generation shouldering these wars, I feel a strong responsibility to document their cost,” van Agtmael said.

Click-through for more from Elissa Curtis on van Agtmael, and a slide show of van Agtmael’s images, along with those of Massimo Berruti, who won the W. Eugene Smith fellowship to continue his work on Pakistan. “The Dusty Path,” Berruti said, is a project “about a nation trapped between violence and political corruption. A trembling giant on the brink of a deep abyss.” Also included is work by Michael Christopher Brown, Bharat Choudhary, Jon Lowenstein, Justin Maxon, Ami Vitale, Farzana Wahidy, and Robert Yager, who were all finalists for these grants. See the slideshow.

“In Afghanistan, everyone has war-related stories to tell,” the photographer Mikhail Galustov told me. “Every family has been hurt by the war in one way or another, and I wanted to find a language of photography that would be different from what I had done before.” In this portrait series, which Galustov began in 2009, he tells the story of war through Afghan faces.

Which leaves many Afghans desperate to flee before the foreign troops leave. “But most of Afghan society is extremely poor, and they won’t have a chance to leave,” he said. “My subjects are like that. They are ordinary people. They will stay and try to survive and live through the changes. Like they did before, like their parents and grandparents did too.”

Click-through for a slideshow of Mikhail Galustov’s Afghan Faces, and their stories: http://nyr.kr/VlWaAx

(Source: newyorker.com)

(Source: newyorker.com)