A s the Taliban entered Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 15, 2021, Qudrat Wasefi, a resolute 22-year-old trumpeter, flung open the windows of his music school’s empty wood-paneled studio and started to play as loudly as he could. “I thought it was my last time,” he tells me, crammed into a …
Read More »
A Taliban air force commander walks into a big, empty gym with his men and hops onto a treadmill. He burns a few calories, cracks a couple of muted jokes, and steps off before lifting a couple of dumbbells. “This was fun,” he says without affect, and moves on to …
Read More »
I think the thing I love most about sports is that under the right set of unpredictable and unlikely circumstances, they can give you that ineffable feeling that anything is possible. Watching the Women’s World Cup this summer, I got that feeling a few times. First, there was the night …
Read More »