This is a profile of the twice-jailed, now-exiled Syrian blogger and activist Razan Ghazzawi, who I met in New York in March. The piece was published by TIME on April 2, 2013.

Portrait of an Activist: Razan Ghazzawi, the Syrian Blogger Turned Exile

On July 18 Razan Ghazzawi, a Syrian blogger and media activist, was in the city of Douma, 45 minutes outside the capital, when she received a call: Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters, dug in in the central Damascus neighborhood of Midan, needed someone who could set up a remote Internet connection. So she and two other activists went in a taxi, circumnavigating military checkpoints, to join the fighters.

Days earlier, Syria’s armed opposition launched an unprecedented assault on the government, which they dubbed Damascus Volcano and Syrian Earthquake. The operation peaked with a bombing at the national-security headquarters in the capital, which killed four top officials, including President Bashar Assad’s brother-in-law. The regime was already striking back, sending helicopter gunships, tanks and snipers after roaming bands of lightly armed rebels.

“I went down there with a taxi driver who we trusted but I don’t know why and how,” Ghazzawi says. “FSA revolutionaries secured our entrance, and I was welcomed as a media expert. I explained I’m not. I’m just a blogger with a laptop and 3G,” she says, referring to her wireless Internet link.

Ghazzawi, 32, is a short, trim woman with large brown eyes. At the time of the Damascus battle, she was the only widely known antiregime blogger writing in English under her real name from inside Syria. She had already been detained by the government twice for her activism since the Syrian uprising began, once for two weeks after being held at the Jordanian border and a second time for 22 days after a raid on the office of her employer, the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression. She left Syria for Sweden in October 2012.

While the majority of news reports from Syria consisted of information stitched together by journalists outside the country and attributed to unnamed “activists,” Ghazzawi was a verified source reporting live from the firing zone, and doing so at great personal risk. “I was the one who uploaded the videos. I was the one who was giving all the information to certain media figures,” she recalled, speaking recently at New York University.

In addition to giving interviews and relaying information to the opposition Local Coordination Committee, she also wrote on her blog. Her dispatches from that July day are a combination of grim updates on the fighting combined with the odd details of life under siege.

“Update 11:17 p.m.,” she writes in her last entry of the day, “Clashes [continue] near regime checkpoints. Two people were injured, their injuries are not critical, they were hit by snipers.” She later signs off with this warm note: “I am having dinner now with citizen journalists and photojournalists, we’re eating tomato and mortadella. Come join us.”

Finish reading this story on TIME.com.

I wrote this piece for VICE about this interesting new political phenomenon. Published February 1, 2013:

EGYPT’S BLACK BLOC—AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

All afternoon last Thursday, demonstrators in Egypt were tearing chunks from a concrete wall on Cairo’s Qasr Al-Aini Street, hurling the stones at riot police who attempted to disperse them with tear gas. The wall had been built by police to keep such protests contained to Tahrir Square, but now it was providing the protestors with ammunition. Suddenly, two youths wearing black ski masks, black sweatshirts, and matching black Adidas athletic pants sauntered up to the wall, carrying lit Molotov cocktails. The pair moved with an odd air of casualness as they scaled the barrier, hurled their fiery payload at the police, then rejoined the crowd.

The attack was one of the first appearances in Egypt of the Black Bloc, a protest formation, long used by anarchists in Europe and North America, involving the use of black masks and clothing to conceal protesters’ identities and project an image of ominous unity. No Western media groups have been able to talk to Egypt’s black bloc—but on a visit to Cairo last week, we scored an interview.

This new mutation in the protest vocabulary instantly triggered a spiraling debate in the streets, on the Internet, on talk shows and in the pages of Egypt’s politically diverse newspapers. Depending on who you ask, the black bloc is either a serious response to state repression of protests, a violent menace to public order, or an exercise in adolescent silliness.

Continue reading this story on VICE.

A dispatch from Cairo on the second anniversary of the revolution, published by VICE on January 26, 2013:

ULTRAS, ANARCHISTS, AND STREET FIGHTING IN EGYPT

As darkness fell on Friday, pro-democracy demonstrators across Egypt were digging in for a long night of fighting with police after a day of generally peaceful marches marking the second anniversary of the revolution that brought down dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Poverty and urban degradation was one of the structural causes of the Egyptian uprising. With the two-year anniversary of the revolution approaching, economic woes were only exaggerating those problems. I wrote this piece for TIME in order to take a deeper look at these issues:

‘No Glimmers of Hope’: Two Years After Egypt’s Revolution, an Economic Crisis Looms

Ramadan Khalaf Amin, 24, a microbus driver who earns the equivalent of $4.50 a day, is one of the myriad faces of the Egyptian revolution the world does not know. “I was going down to Tahrir the whole time,” Amin remembers of the uprising, whipping out a cell phone to play a video of a demonstrators chanting, “Down with Hosni Mubarak!”

On a recent Friday, Amin was parked at the noisy junction where the ramshackle brick buildings of the Manshiet Nasser district meet the main highway, one of many such points where commuters make the crossing from Cairo’s unplanned, helter-skelter slums into the government-planned districts of the city. It was at this intersection where, during the uprising, demonstrators set fire to the local government offices.

With the two-year anniversary of the revolt approaching, Egypt’s economy is struggling, and the new Muslim Brotherhood–backed government is far from resolving the manifold problems of poverty and urban deprivation that bubbled beneath the 2011 revolt. If anything, a rapidly dropping currency combined with austeritymeasures mandated by international lenders means that life is only going to get harder for the middle class and the poor in the coming months.

Amin’s parents migrated to Cairo from the Upper Egypt town of Asyut years ago in search of work. He was born in Cairo and lived his whole life in Manshiet Nasser, dropping out of school after the fourth grade. Amin is actually faring better than many in his neighborhood. The family moved into recently built subsidized housing. He earns more than the quarter of Egypt’s 80 million people surviving on just a dollar and a half a day, according to government figures released in 2012.

He despairs at lacking government services in his neighborhood and the slow pace of change since the revolt. “I don’t think this area will ever change,” he says, referring to Manshiet Nasser. “People are not only poor but also uneducated.”

Poverty alone does not cause revolutions. Many other countries are poorer and more socially stratified than Egypt. People of a broad swath of social classes participated in the uprising that toppled the Mubarak regime. Their grievances with the autocratic regime were many, including corruption, a lack of freedom of expression and an often terrifying police state. But a widening gap between rich and poor, eroding infrastructure and government neglect of the shantytowns were also part of the long, complex backstory of the popular uprising that toppled Mubarak.

Who were the demonstrators, young and old, hurling stones at riot police? Some of them were college-educated, tech-savvy activists who tweeted every tear-gas volley to the world. But many of them are were also street vendors, garbage collectors, militant soccer fans or bus drivers like Ramadan Khalaf Amin. Many of them are migrants from the Nile Delta and Upper Egypt (where poverty rates are even higher than in Cairo) living in buildings with electricity siphoned from the municipal grid. One of the slogans most frequently chanted during the revolt was, “Bread, freedom, social justice!”

Continue reading this story at TIME.com

An analysis piece I wrote for TIME, published on January 15, 2013:

Mubarak’s New Trial: How Egyptian Politics Will Weave Its Way into It

Human-rights advocates are cautiously welcoming a decision by Egypt’s top appeals court to order a retrial for former President Hosni Mubarak and other top officials over the killings of protesters during the uprising that ejected him from power in 2011. The June 2, 2012 verdict touched off a wave of marches, with demonstrators once again seizing control of Cairo’s Tahrir Square, dragging barricades into place within moments of Judge Ahmed Rifaat’s announcement of the decision on live television. Although the court gave Mubarak and former Interior Minister Habib el-Adly life sentences for failing to prevent protesters’ deaths, demonstrators were angry that the three-judge panel had failed to convict four top Interior Ministry officials widely seen as responsible for the killings of protesters during the January 2011 uprising.

On Sunday the appeals court overturned that decision and ordered a retrial in the case. A small crowd of Mubarak loyalists reportedly celebrated the decision, but this time there were no major opposition protests. Mubarak, now 84 and being held in a military hospital, remains under investigation in a separate case and will not go free.

A retrial in the case opens the possibility of staging a more credible trial and bringing in new evidence, including information found in a recently completed report by a high-level fact-finding commission tasked with investigating protesters’ deaths. Human Rights Watch’s Egypt director Heba Morayef says the initial trial of Mubarak and his aides had been both politicized and procedurally flawed. “There were clear procedural violations and so that, in and of itself, for me, from a fair-trial perspective, means that that original sentence needed to be overturned, on purely technical grounds,” she says.

Judge Rifaat’s June decision did not establish Mubarak’s personal involvement in the deaths of protesters, and went further to say that there was no evidence that the police were involved, a statement many Egyptians find hard to believe after witnessing the street fighting between police and protesters during the uprising.

Continue reading at TIME.com.

A piece of cultural analysis I wrote for VICE, published on January 15, 2013:

IS SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS THE NEW CHE GUEVARA?

On a Friday afternoon this past June, a new wave of pro-democracy demonstrations roiled downtown Cairo. Protestors were angry that ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmad Shafiq, had advanced to the runoff in the country’s historic presidential election.

In the midst of the turmoil, a young activist with black-rimmed glasses, his fist raised skyward, led the crowd in chants against the old regime. He was easy to spot, perched atop a comrade’s shoulders, and wearing a bright yellow T-shirt emblazoned with the image of the beloved yellow undersea creature of animated children’s television, SpongeBob Squarepants.

SpongeBob is a familiar sight in Tahrir Square nowadays. The vendors in the square hawking Egyptian flags and shirts printed with revolutionary slogans almost always also sell SpongeBob-branded T-shirts. The casual visitor to the square in early 2013 might even wonder if SpongeBob has become, like the ubiquitous Che Guevara shirts or the spooky Guy Fawkes masks made popular by the film V for Vendetta, a bizarre transnational pop culture symbol of resistance.

Shereif Elkeshta, an Egyptian-American filmmaker who travels frequently between New York and Cairo, said he first noticed the bright yellow shirts during a visit to the square last May, over a year after the revolution. “Suddenly it was no longer about hurriya [freedom] ath-thawra [the revolution] or 25th of January, it just became T-shirts, and SpongeBob, maybe it’s just the New Yorker in me, but SpongeBob? Do these people even know what SpongeBob is?”

Elkeshta later cited the SpongeBob phenomenon in an essay about the incoherent state of politics in Egypt in an independent monthly paper called Midan Masr. He wrote, “Why isn’t he [SpongeBob] at least holding a Molotov cocktail? Or raising a fist?”

Continue reading this story on VICE.

A piece I wrote for TIME, published on January 8, 2013:

Cairo’s New Normal: Protests Spawn a World of Walls and Barricades

Ramadan Romih, the heavyset manager of the White House Net, an Internet café up the street from the U.S. embassy in Cairo, sat on a chair on the sidewalk outside his shop, smoking a large tobacco water pipe. He hasn’t had many customers recently, he says, because of the high concrete wall blocking the street next to his shop. The wall was built by the Egyptian government this past November to ward off demonstrators from nearby Tahrir Square away from the embassy.

Romih, 41, commutes downtown from a working-class neighborhood near the pyramids. His shop ordinarily depends on foot traffic from the bustling business districts surrounding Tahrir Square, but now because of an elaborate system of walls and barbed-wire roadblocks built by the authorities, the area near the embassy has been cut off from the core of the downtown.

As a result, he said, his business is “at zero.” By late afternoon that day his revenue was only 20 Egyptian pounds, or a little over $3. “People should dig tunnels like they do in Gaza,” he said, waving his water-pipe hose at the unsightly wall.

Two of the storefronts adjacent to White House Net were gutted, Romih said, during recent clashes between demonstrators and police. The burned-out shell of a car still lies upside down in the road in front of the shop. Across the street, men in business suits were hoisting themselves over a tall iron fence in order to get home from work, handing briefcases to one another over the top of the barrier. Armed security men stationed at a checkpoint leading to the embassy looked on.

Because of the government’s walls, scenes like this one are the new normal in the upscale neighborhood of Garden City and other areas south of Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the winter 2011 uprising that ended the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. On one recent afternoon, at the same intersection near the embassy I saw a young woman hand a pink plastic carrier containing a fluffy white cat to a man, her husband or fiancé, before hopping over the fence. The two then strolled, arm in arm, cat in tow, in the direction of Tahrir.

 Continue reading on TIME.com.

A dispatch I wrote for VICE about Egypt’s ongoing political crisis, published January 3, 2013:

THE REVOLUTION IS STILL GOING ON IN EGYPT—IN TINY FLASHES

Cairo’s Tahrir Square is permanently occupied these days. Though the wave of unrest that swept Egypt after embattled President Mohamed Morsi’s consolidation of power in November 2012 has subsided, the tents remain, as do the banners hanging from lampposts denouncing the Muslim Brotherhood. Wiry young men, some of them brandishing sticks, patrol the entrances to the square to prevent pro-government thugs from entering.

At the center of the square, a “Revolution Museum” honors the past two years of protests, first against dictator Hosni Mubarak, then against the interim military government, and now against Morsi, who in the opposition’s view has himself betrayed democratic hopes in Egypt by centralizing power and pushing through a new constitution drafted by conservatives in the Muslim Brotherhood and other Morsi allies. The museum, for its part, is a makeshift affair: the walls are made of plastic sheeting attached to wooden stakes, and tacked to the walls are hundreds of handwritten signs and photos of violent confrontations between protestors and police. Eight hundred forty protesters died in the 18 days of the initial uprising in January and February 2011, with dozens killed in protests since then.

Among the people taking in this montage when I visited this Sunday was Ahmed Hassan, a pharmacist’s assistant from the Nile Delta town of Mansoura. Dressed in rubber sandals, soccer pants, and a dirty T-shirt, Ahmed, who is 25, has been sleeping in a tent in Tahrir for a month. “We’re not leaving,” he told me. Ahmed and his fellow protesters say they want Morsi to void the new constitution and they plan to stay until that happens.

Before Morsi’s power grabs, it wasn’t uncommon for non-Islamist revolutionaries like Hassan to count Muslim Brotherhood members as their friends and comrades in a common fight against the remnants of the old dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak.  But after a month of fighting, those alliances have been broken. When a few weeks ago, in December 2012, supporters of the president attacked opposition members camped out outside the presidential palace and triggered street fighting that killed seven people, it only made matters worse. “[Morsi’s supporters] call themselves the Muslim Brotherhood,” Ahmed tells me. Like most protestors, he considers himself a devout Muslim. “Well, what does that make us then? The brotherhood of nonbelievers?”

Continue reading at VICE.

A piece on airstrikes on Palestinian media installations in Gaza during the November fighting there, published by Columbia Journalism Review on November 19, 2012:

Israeli airstrikes hit Gazan media facilities

On Sunday morning, Israel’s warplanes attacked two media centers as part of its current military offensive against Gaza. The first of the two strikes hit a building where I worked for three months in 2010, and where my former colleagues at the Palestinian news agency Maan still work.

The first strike, at around 1:30 a.m. local time, hit the Shawa and Husari media tower, the base of operations for a number of broadcasters, including Germany’s ARD and Italy’s RAI. According to reports, four Israeli missiles came through the roof of the building and exploded in the offices of Beirut-based Al-Quds satellite network. At least six media workers were wounded in the attack, including Khader Zahhar, 20, a cameraman for Al-Quds TV, who had his leg amputated.

Then, just before 7 a.m., warplanes attacked a second building, the Shuruq tower, which houses a set of media organizations including Fox News, Al-Arabiya, and Britain’s ITN and Sky, moderately wounding three other Palestinian journalists.

Continue reading at CJR.

My report on the Occupy Wall Street movement’s rebirth as a relief effort in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, published on TIME.com on November 13, 2012:

Best of Enemies: Why Occupy Activists Are Working with New York City’s Government

Two hundred people were lined up at a hurricane relief center in a park in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood on Sunday morning when three volunteers hoisted the banners of two enemy camps that had come together in an uneasy collaboration: the Occupy movement and the office of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

One of those helping hang the banners on white tents with duct tape was Red Hook resident Kirby Desmarais, 26, a band manager and volunteer with the local branch of Occupy Sandy, an effort launched the day after Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of the East Coast in late October. “I’m getting a little verklempt. This is a really big thing,” Desmarais said, looking at the two signs, using the Yiddish word for choked with emotion. One banner read, “Occupy Sandy Mutual Aid Not Charity.” The other, sent by the mayor’s office, read, “City of New York Distribution and Relief Center.”

Behind the tents, volunteers unloaded boxes of meals ready to eat from a six-wheel National Guard truck. Red Hook residents, many of whom still lacked electricity in their homes, filed in to fill shopping carts with canned goods, batteries, candles and bottled water. Police officers looked on. Two officials from the Mayor’s Community Affairs Unit (CAU) soon appeared but declined to answer questions. Separate from the relief point, a hulking truck sent by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sat on the other side of the park, out of sight.

Before the hurricane, direct collaboration between Occupy activists and city authorities would have been unthinkable. It was a year ago this week that Bloomberg ordered an early-morning police raid that uprooted the Occupy Wall Street encampment from Zuccotti Park in the financial district, ending a weeks-long standoff. The eviction ended the potent first phase of the movement, which had captivated the media, inspired an international Occupy protest and resulted in numerous confrontations with police.

Read the rest of the story at TIME.