Good morning…

• Salman Adil Hussain reviews Deepa Kumar‘s Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire.  Hussain writes, “Kumar shines a bright light on liberal Islamophobia, and shows how the Obama administration’s emphasis on homegrown terrorism generated a lot of talk about ‘terrorists in our midst’ in the mainstream American media and presented right-wing Islamophobes with the opportunity they needed to (re-)popularise the old ‘Islamic peril’.”
• David J. Morris asks: “How much does culture matter for P.T.S.D.?”  The following quote from the article is powerful and worth contemplating: “The growing criticism of our current understanding of P.T.S.D. suggests that what was once ignored or treated as a failure of character—the soldier’s weakness—has now been medicalized to the exclusion of discussing its moral and spiritual dimensions. “It feels to me as if the U.S. civilian population has pathologized the veteran experience,” Elliott Woods, an Iraq veteran-turned-reporter, told me not long ago. “
• Pranaya discusses regimes of truth in (war) photography.
• Jon Hochstartner reviews the politics of one of my favorite Rockstar Games: Red Dead Redemption.  Hochstartner argues, “In the end, Rockstar sides with the rebels, but quite unenthusiastically. And the publisher seems to go further, cynically suggesting government can never be representative of the people’s interests, no matter the circumstances, no matter how much the masses struggle. This, of course, leaves no room for progressive change.”
• Evan Narcisse says “Slavery gives me a weird personal connection to Assassin’s Creed IV.”  He writes, “Roll your eyes if you want but entertainment set in the days of yore tends to primarily come in the lighter shades of humanity’s spectrum. In an age when it seems like every other video game lets you rampage through New York City streets, Greco-Roman coliseums or Old World Europe analogues, I’m excited to trawl the waters of the Caribbean and pull into the ports of a homeland I’m still trying to know.”