Last month, Keith Richburg, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent and the director of the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, wrote that “the old Hong Kong of raucous debate and protest, of independent-minded activists and politicians and filmmakers, is gone.” At about the same time, the Lebanese writer and translator Lina Mounzer published an essay titled “Lebanon as We Once Knew It Is Gone.”
Elsewhere, too, others have been experiencing the end of a way of life. Just a few days before Richburg’s and Mounzer’s articles came out, Mujib Mashal, a New York Times correspondent who was born under Taliban rule, took a bus around his hometown as the Taliban were once again closing in on Afghanistan’s capital. He had grown up in that interim period of hope and transformation, and reported “feeling that the window on Kabul as my generation knew it was closing.”
https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/620435/
