The Place Where Everyone Votes | Turkey's Rebel Rapper

Who cares? A rural New Mexico community and its passionate residents, about civic duty and a curious sheriff’s race.

Harding County consists of two towns that between them have one gas station and no stoplights. Yet its residents rally to paint beautiful murals on buildings that most outsiders will never see, along state highways that most drivers will never travel. It’s the type of proud homestead where nearly one-tenth of the 650 residents travel hours to root for its girls basketball team, which made the state playoffs despite having only five players (in one game this season, the team finished with two players on the court after three fouled out — and still won by a point). Where the ascension of a local boy to the New Mexico Statehouse was rare enough to spur Election Day parties … and the curious controversy surrounding a local sheriff’s race spawned heated debates and spurred generations of families to the polls last November.

For Ezhel, being Turkey’s most exciting rap star is both thrilling and perilous.

In the packed prison cell, without a moment’s privacy, music helped Ezhel stay sane. A fellow inmate had looked askance at the young rapper when he’d asked to play his baglama, a traditional stringed Turkish instrument. “[But] I began to play, and for the rest of the days they treated me like a radio — as if I had a button and they would switch me on,” he grins. “Thank God there was a baglama inside.”

The 28-year-old was Spotify’s most-streamed artist in Turkey in 2018 and is arguably the country’s first mainstream rapper. But his incendiary, taboo-breaking music has made him enemies within Turkey’s authoritarian state. Over the past year or so he has faced six different criminal charges, which many believe are politically motivated.

The world’s biggest summits are turning into speed-dating meetups for global leaders.

When leaders of the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy and Canada meet in the picturesque French seaside town of Biarritz later this week, the official reason for their gathering will be the G-7 summit. But for many of them, the focus will be on bilateral meetings with a bombastic politician boasting a peculiar mop of bright hair — not U.S. President Donald Trump, but British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who’ll parley with his global counterparts for the first time since taking office last month.

But the focus on those one-on-one meetings reflects a broader, growing pattern: Major summits are increasingly serving less as gatherings of world leaders hoping to forge an international consensus and more as a space for speed dating among those leaders as they seek critical bilateral deals. Look no further than June’s G-20 summit in Osaka. There, Trump’s deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping to pause their trade war was the highlight of the event. In all, Trump had 10 bilateral meetings in Osaka, compared to eight in 2018. The highlight of the 2017 G-20 summit? Trump’s infamous meet-and-greet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, their first since the 2016 presidential elections that Moscow tried to influence.