July 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...
Read MoreJune 12, 2024
Waiting for Two States feels like waiting for the Messiah. Okay, okay, but when? And meanwhile, what? Asking a civilization that is hemorrhaging – one whose civilians have no government whose primary concern is to protect them, and no place where they feel safe – to go about constructing a state is an exercise in...
Read MoreJune 10, 2024
I first met Sean Abley in the early-90s, as participants in the Chicago theatre scene. He had a theatre company called The Factory Theatre, where he put on shows he wrote and also directed. He was a phenom, and these shows (Bitches, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians: The Musical, Attack of the Killer B’s, Nuclear...
Read MoreMay 25, 2024
The word “unprecedented” in a headline always makes me grimace. Our fast-paced, click-obsessed mass media shirks historicity in the face of heat and hyperbole. Myopia reigns. One has to investigate to discover if precedent in fact exists. Even if the answer is no, even if the superlative was warranted, one has nonetheless been prompted to...
Read MoreMay 20, 2024
One of the craziest moments in American cinema comes in Ernst Lubitsch’s nervy unclassifiable To Be or Not to Be (1942), when Carole Lombard, playing a famous Polish actress, pays a call on a Nazi (Stanley Ridges) at Gestapo headquarters. She has to stall for time and pretend-submit to his seduction. He kisses her, and...
Read MoreMay 14, 2024
Genesis is a book of families, but it takes quite a while before the various siblings found within speak to each other. Husbands and wives speak to one another right off the bat, people fairly regularly talk to angels, and mothers and fathers address their children, but dozens of generations come and go before brothers...
Read MoreApril 2, 2024
“Were you culture-shocked?” is the question people often ask upon discovering that, at the age of twenty, I moved from Iran to the West. “Of course I was,” I usually say. “I still am.” But I suspect they mis-imagine the tribulations of that transition. Exchanging the Tehran of the 2000s, where I spent much of...
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