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December 18, 2024
Everything We Need
Zain Khalid
Since Elias Khoury, the celebrated Lebanese novelist and critic, died in September, I have been thinking about a passage from his 1998 epic of Palestinian displacement, Gate of the Sun. “You should have eaten the oranges,” Khoury’s narrator is told by a former freedom fighter. “The homeland is something we have to consume,” the freedom fighter continues. “We have to devour the oranges of Palestine, and we have to devour...
December 18, 2024
And One Day the Work Dies
Angelo Hernandez Sias
A man dies while out clubbing, then watches as his body is brought to the home of a famous fashion designer, who fondles it. This is the plot of “The Return,” a late story by Roberto Bolaño. It is also the plot of Bolaño’s authorial afterlife. In the 21 years since his death, his body of work has been handled a lot by Anglophone critics and publishers, who, like so many...
December 18, 2024
The Empire Marches On
Siddhartha Deb
In 1913, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize in literature on the basis of Gitanjali, a single volume of poems idiosyncratically self-translated from Bengali into English. “A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination,” W.B. Yeats wrote in his introduction. A British colonial subject, Tagore was an inhabitant of that thing we call the world, which...
December 16, 2024
In Ruins | Archaeological Warfare in the West Bank
Jasper Nathaniel
On the quiet afternoon of March 5, 2024 in the northern occupied West Bank, I watched as a convoy of Israeli military jeeps drove along a narrow, winding road lined with terraced olive groves, passing the remnants of at least ten major civilizations dating back to the Bronze Age, to the summit of the tallest hill in Sebastia, a Palestinian village of about four thousand people. Near the hilltop archaeological...
December 11, 2024
On the Grid | How Surveillance Became a Love Language
Zoë Hitzig
A full-page ad in a November 1990 issue of Fortune magazine features two dozen men in dark suits turned away from the viewer. Standing in neat rows, most blend together in a uniform mass. But three are singled out, with red targets pinned to their backs. The text below the shadowy tableau reads: “Wouldn’t it be great if new customers were this easy to spot? Now they can be.” Bullseye....
December 9, 2024
Theater of Warning | Living Through Israel’s Attacks on Lebanon
Zeead Yaghi
The airstrikes came like clockwork. Every day between September 19 and November 26, the Israeli Defense Force’s Arabic spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, posted a series of “warnings” on X, mapping that night’s planned attacks on Beirut’s southern suburbs. Targeted buildings were colored in red, and the accompanying messages instructed residents to evacuate. Adraee’s announcements were highly descriptive. Often, he used colloquial or informal names of streets and buildings, and included details...
December 3, 2024
Whose Weil? | Simone, Patron Saint of Everyone
Jack Hanson
During the First World War, a six-year-old Simone Weil learned that soldiers on the Western Front were not rationed sugar, so she refused to eat it until conditions improved. But whereas most leave such zealous empathy in childhood, Weil’s commitment to suffering with — or, at least, in the same way as — others became the hallmark of her work as a philosopher and political activist, as well as of...
November 21, 2024
The Free State | Fiction
Ella Fox-Martens
The way he finds out that Antjie is dead is through a short, harried phone call with his uncle Pieter, who rings him from the side of the road in Maritzburg. Traffic roars by, cutting out his words at inopportune moments. Pieter has to say “body” three times before Jaco understands. After the conversation, during which he mindlessly and methodically tears each page out of his roommate’s nearby notebook, Jaco...
November 12, 2024
Editors’ Note | Country Over Party
The Editors
Joe Biden’s first campaign for president, in the 1988 election cycle, met with a swift and ignominious demise. The Delaware senator’s attempts to cast himself as the candidate of youth and change — the standard-bearer of the “Pepsi Generation,” a Kennedy for the ’80s — fell flat. (Perhaps voters had some premonition of the senescent egomaniac we know today.) Three months after the campaign’s launch, the scandals, or, more precisely,...
November 4, 2024
Borderlands, Betrayed | How Hispanic Democrats Abandoned Progressivism in South Texas
Gabriel Antonio Solis
In February, before the Democrats swapped candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump separately visited Texas on the same day to present their respective plans for cracking down on border crossing. In Eagle Pass, Trump walked along a razor-wire fence, telling Border Patrol agents — and TV cameras — that the country was “being overrun” by “Biden migrant crime.” Biden, standing in front of another Border Patrol group a few hundred...
