by adam rasmi in TIME
(Courtesy Adam Rasmi)
I sat down with NATO Secretary-General and former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte ahead of the high-stakes June 24-25 summit. We spoke at length about getting Europe to spend trillions more on defense—and keep Donald Trump on side.
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by adam rasmi in TIME
Kyriakos Mitsotakis at the Maximos Mansion in Athens on March 12. (Courtesy Yiorgos Kaplanidis for TIME)
In March, I had the chance to sit down with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in Athens for TIME’s latest print edition. We chatted the historic same-sex marriage legislation, Greece’s economic rebound, his love of TikTok and Guns N’ Roses, and more.
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by adam rasmi in TIME
(Courtesy Adam Rasmi)
A few weeks back, I sat down with the European Parliament President in Brussels. We discussed reforming and modernizing the E.U.’s only democratically elected institution in the wake of Qatargate, the biggest corruption scandal in decades.
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by adam rasmi in TIME
Solar panels installed at the Fouad Chehab stadium. (Myriam Boulos—Magnum Photos for TIME)
About 2,300 ft. above Beirut in the Matn District mountains, Roger Mazloum and his brother Elias greet me on an unusually balmy winter day as they chop wood to help keep their early 20th century home warm before the cold returns. I’m no match for these burlier Lebanese men, who grew up in Broummana, a town of 15,000 people about a dozen miles east of the Lebanese capital, but I politely take my turn, meekly swinging an ax at the tree stump before us. After a lackluster start, and plenty of patience from the pair, something akin to firewood begins to splinter off.
Roger takes me through the family home’s front door—past a living room with traditional Lebanese floor tiles and artwork dedicated to the late Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian titan of Arabic music—and up the stairs to the roof. The pine-covered mountains and a foggy glimpse of the Mediterranean Sea are a pleasant distraction, but the real purpose of the tour is to see the 18 solar panels slightly obscuring the vista. Like tens of thousands of Lebanese people, the Mazloums have turned to solar power to generate reliable—and cost-effective—electricity in a country where the crisis-stricken state provides as little as one or two hours of power a day.
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by adam rasmi in TIME
May 9-16 issue. (Courtesy TIME)
Thrilled to share that I joined TIME magazine as World Affairs Editor earlier this month. I’ll be commissioning and editing stories from London, with a focus on Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The role will involve some writing and working across both online and print.
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by adam rasmi in Monocle
The Saudi TV show Jameel Jeddan airs on Shahid. (Courtesy imdb)
Jameel is gazing out the backseat window of her taxi when she spots a glamorous brunette cruising along in a roofless mustard-yellow sports car. “Wow. Even women can drive now?” she says to herself, looking on in amazement.
Jameel is the main character in Jameel Jeddan, a new, critically acclaimed Saudi TV series about a young woman who wakes up after five years in a coma to a transformed kingdom, where the power of ultra-conservative clerics has waned. The comedy-drama is the first Saudi TV show to be written by and star a Saudi woman.
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by adam rasmi in Monocle
June 2022 edition. (Courtesy Monocle)
“There is no media industry in Russia any more – the Kremlin destroyed everything,” says Galina Timchenko, CEO of Meduza, one of the largest Russian independent news outlets still in operation. “Those who are still inside Russia are under wartime censorship.” Timchenko knows a fair bit about censorship. She launched Meduza in 2014 after being sacked from lenta.ru for its critical coverage of Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. Timchenko packed her bags and set up shop in Riga, Latvia, telling a colleague that she wanted to launch a site where “if somebody cuts off our head, two will emerge”.
The colleague told her to call it Meduza, confusing the serpent-haired gorgon (also known as Medusa) with mythological monster Hydra. “It was the mistake of a guy who had been up all night,” says Timchenko, laughing. The image of many heads remains apt: the outlet now employs some 40 journalists and reaches millions of people every month, the majority of whom are in Russia.
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by adam rasmi in Quartz
I’ve joined Quartz as a reporter. I’ll be writing for qz.com, the flagship Daily Brief newsletter, and the award-winning chatbot-style mobile app.
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by adam rasmi in Maisonneuve
Fall 2017 issue. (Courtesy Maisonneuve)
Today I searched the terms “penicillin skullduggery,” “almond loincloth,” and “cat walker”; the latter led me to a do-it-yourself guide on how to create a $20 walking aid for a cat suffering from cerebellar hypoplasia. These are not subjects that would ordinarily interest me, but were instead the results of a tool called Internet Noise, which generates random searches every five seconds using Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” feature. By adding false data, or noise, to your search history, the tool protests the omnipresent culture of mass electronic surveillance.
On March 28, the US Congress overturned Federal Communications Commission rules that would have blocked the right of internet service providers to track and sell your online activity to whomever they please. In response, Philadelphia-based software engineer Dan Schultz developed Internet Noise, a bare-bones web tool—a mere thirty lines of code in all. As Schultz explains, any decent computer algorithm can see through the obfuscation. Internet Noise was always meant to be an act of protest rather than a genuine privacy tool; he calls it "a way to give the middle finger to people in power." Its creation struck a public nerve—one article about Internet Noise in Wired was shared around thirty thousand times on Facebook and remained the website's most read piece for days.
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by adam rasmi in Maisonneuve
Winter 2016 issue. (Courtesy Maisonneuve)
In the fall of 2008, during her fourth year at the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College in Toronto, Dr. Anne Lakeland* listened carefully as a financial advisor delivered a talk about the need for life and disability insurance. The audience, all students in their final year, were told that they were excellent candidates for insurance—as long as they didn’t have any serious medical conditions.
The soon-to-be chiropractor was concerned: her father carries the genetic mutation responsible for Huntington’s disease, an inherited, often fatal brain disorder that leads to impaired motor and cognitive functions. Lakeland approached the financial advisor and asked whether her father’s condition would affect her applications. The advisor offered to make some anonymous inquiries on her behalf.
Lakeland was told that without life and disability insurance, she would be unable to set up a medical practice. So when the insurance companies told her intermediary that . . .
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