November 17, 2025
My eyes tonight have no care for the careful geometries of these Southern houses. My hands are on the wheel and I can’t wipe my eyes. J’s out in the park chasing balls and girls, dirt and flesh fused together on his knees. Once, we wore shorts of the same neon blue. Or was it...
Read MoreNovember 10, 2025
Michel Foucault wrote that an essential element of authoritarian racism is “the administrative prose of a State that defends itself in the name of a social heritage that has to be kept pure.” If administrative prose is vital to the mechanisms of persecution and oppression from a predatory state, then it should be possible for...
Read MoreNovember 3, 2025
In April 2024, a friend passed me a package. He had received it from someone who attended a debate I had with an Israeli academic in Taiwan, and that person gave him the booklet. I was living in Taiwan, four months past my mother’s death in Khan Younis. The package contained a booklet — stories,...
Read MoreOctober 27, 2025
What a strange and uncomfortable coincidence that the New York Film Festival has programmed one of its best line-ups during one of the worst years in modern American history. Filing out of any given screening, opening your laptop and checking your phone after hours in the dark, you might find soldiers advancing on American cities,...
Read MoreOctober 20, 2025
In the summer of 2024, I left my marriage and, with it, my house, my hometown, and my job. A year later, I had a new partner, a new apartment, and a new job. A seamless transition—except for the guilt, shame, and self-loathing that followed me from one life to the next. I soon found...
Read MoreOctober 13, 2025
Lovers of noir are generally aware that the term was initially applied to the works of a set of US authors and filmmakers in retrospect, from afar, when the French were first granted access to films that had been banned under Nazi occupation. It was introduced by actor and screenwriter Marcel Duhamel, who founded Gallimard’s...
Read MoreOctober 6, 2025
I was in Shangri-La, in a village in the Tibetan Himalayas on October 7th, 2023. More precisely, I was in the Shangri-La tourism zone of Yunnan, a popular Chinese travel destination marketed as the “true location” of a legendary hidden utopia in the Tibetan mountains. My Israeli husband, Gil, sent me a message on my...
Read MoreSeptember 29, 2025
1 The Last Reader in the Whole World All things come to an end. The history of reading begins in the shadows: clay tablets in Mesopotamia; finger-marks on cave walls. How this history ends is more obscure. But it will end. Consult any literary periodical, and you’ll see that the demise of reading is prophesied...
Read MoreSeptember 22, 2025
On the first day of spring, which is also the day of the New Year in Iran, Parvaneh E’temadi passed away. She is regarded as the most significant female painter in the history of Iran. Female painter. She did not like this epithet. If someone referred to her as a “female painter,” she would respond...
Read MoreSeptember 15, 2025
There are almost no non-Israeli performers in Israel now. Whether due to fear of missiles, travel disruptions incurred by intermittent flights, or the compulsion to boycott Israel — entertainment is homegrown in that country these days. Unsurprisingly, the 2025 Israeli concert calendar has been dominated by one traveling show in particular, already attended by 150,000...
Read MoreSeptember 8, 2025
Scott Fitzgerald wrote his fantasies into existence, an unusual and in many ways unfortunate ability. In a telegram to Zelda during college he boasted that life was “something you dominate if you’re any good.” Having achieved, and then lost, the acclaim he craved, in his thirties he declared himself an “emotional bankrupt,” a loser in...
Read MoreSeptember 2, 2025
The Palestinians have been waiting for a state for a long time. Recognizing the State of Palestine, as several European countries have chosen to do in the recent weeks, is about much more than politics — recognition itself confers dignity. After decades of sacrifice and suffering under occupation, Palestinians long for a future rid of...
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