August 13, 2024
Where I’m from the summers are hot and humid and getting longer every year, a run of breezeless green months full of screeching crickets and biting flies and birds that wake to sing through the evenings. I spent my childhood sweaty and sunburned, sticking to furniture and swatting mosquitos and lying in front of box...
Read MoreAugust 11, 2024
“We must stem the tide of malice,” Mary Bennet says to her sister Elizabeth after they learn that the youngest Bennet, Lydia, has run off to London with Mr. Wickham, “and pour into the wounded bosoms of each other the balm of sisterly consolation.” Elizabeth can only “[lift] up her eyes in amazement” at this...
Read MoreAugust 7, 2024
My family left Capri sipping cordials. Aboard the skipper, alongside us, was a young couple from the Southeastern U.S. The husband chatted up my father. He was in his late thirties, working as a financial broker-dealer in North Georgia, and feeling the ceiling. His own zip and zeal, he felt, were underfoaming, and the rural...
Read MoreAugust 5, 2024
Now you’re telling me You’re not nostalgic Then give me another word for it You who are so good with words And at keeping things vague — Joan Baez, “Diamonds and Rust” I In the autumn of 2018, I received from an estranged family member in Vienna some documents once belonging to my great-grandmother,...
Read MoreJuly 29, 2024
My face mask is strapped wrong such that the yellow bands strain awkwardly on the back of my skull, bunching up my hair into a silly-looking poof, but I don’t notice because there’s a whirring machine in front of me, looping a pad of gray foam in quick circles, ready to brush something. I am...
Read MoreJuly 26, 2024
You can trust my characters. Whatever else they are — and they’re not always nice — at least they’re upfront. They don’t hide anything. They scream, laugh, cry, jump around and get drunk. But our society makes people into hidden people — stiff upper lip, keep quiet, don’t show it. I suppose if there is...
Read MoreJuly 25, 2024
My mother has charged me with transferring my father’s ashes from the cardboard box they have been sitting in for years into a proper urn. We sit together in the wood-paneled living room, littered with packing peanuts and a collection of ornamental urns and mini-urns she has bought on eBay. “Well what do you think?”...
Read MoreJuly 4, 2024
From now on, you are someone else Mahmoud Darwish Translated by Hamze Awawde Note on the text: “From now on, you are someone else” was the poem penned by Mahmoud Darwish to warn us about Hamas after its victory in 2006. His alarm about Hamas’ ascendence, his understanding of what the ascendance meant, has ramifications...
Read MoreJuly 2, 2024
The Mirror of Society Ibrahim Al-Assil It is crucial to understand what modern propaganda looks like. Often, it comes under the guise of advocacy. By definition, advocacy embraces bias. Advocates usually push for specific policy options, and debates around social policy are not hard science issues like math or physics. Advocacy typically promotes one idea...
Read MoreJuly 2, 2024
We tell ourselves myths in order to live with ourselves. Historians have the unpleasant responsibility of making that a little more difficult for us than it would otherwise be. This is a story about such a myth, and about the truth it obscures. Guatemala was not a country at peace in 1977. It was still...
Read MoreJune 14, 2024
There was little talk of what would happen next. There were wills being made out, insurance policies double-checked, and VHS tapes like “Cancer Doesn’t Scare Me” purchased. Holistic nutrition guides appeared around the house — vegetarianism was tried, an array of supplements bought from TV mail order suppliers. He drank more orange juice. Orange juice,...
Read MoreJune 13, 2024
In the 1980s, a football player visiting Shenandoah County’s Stonewall Jackson High School could be forgiven for wondering what century he’d entered when he took the field. His hosts’ cheerleaders would run up and down the sidelines waving the stars and bars. Hometown fans, some dressed in gray, would respond with the rebel yell. And...
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