‘At no point during the two and a half decades I’ve been visiting Cuba has the 𝘭𝘪𝘣𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘢 ration alone covered basic needs. This is the reason Cubans spend so much time and energy engaged in 𝘭𝘢 𝘭𝘶𝘤𝘩𝘢, the daily struggle to make ends meet.’ J.S. Tennant in Cuba www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘We only die once, and death comes to you anywhere.’ @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Adania Shibli in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

‘Fifa’s remorseless commodification of the people’s game is set to result in a gated tournament confined to those few with the requisite income, visa status and social media history.’ Online early: Simon Skinner on the history of the World Cup. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Walter Benjamin in @newleftreview.bsky.social newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

Fireworks at home, bombs overseas.

Change in Iran: ‘this is not some other people’s fight’ @channel4news.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUP1...

Protests return to Baghdad, farmers from parched peripheries and unemployed graduates priced out in the gentrified capital. A poem by Sargon Boulus, the vagabond Beatnik from al-Habaniyyah, says: "the people demand bread, each loaf is a mourning flag." And each politician is a thief, the people cry.

On the @lrb.co.uk podcast this week, I speak with @muhammadshehada.bsky.social and @jehadabusalim.bsky.social about Gaza since the “ceasefire.” www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...

A painting made on a wrinkled piece of muslin from the series Silent Letters resembles a weathered and enigmatic missive. Caland once playfully told a friend that she could have been a writer but chose painting in order “to be incomprehensible.” In the @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Iraq’s Kata’ib Hezbollah threatens to attack Washington’s “bases and interests” in the country in the event the US sides with Israel after tonight’s escalation with Iran.

Ayman Hussein's life and family were torn apart by the U.S. invasion and its consequences. It is unfortunate that he is not facing the ragtag U.S. side in the group stage, otherwise he would have placed them where they belonged. www.reuters.com/sports/socce...

“The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise.” @fotoole.bsky.social in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Even the World Cup squad announcement is an embarrassment in Iraq. AI generated, automated male voiceover, cliched references to Babylon, a hollowed image dominated by the face of a white coach here to assuage an old yearning for colonial mentorship. This is how incompetence and corruption manifest.

"American society—grotesquely unequal and divided, helpless before its demagogic and oligarchic manipulators—is no longer a stranger to the dark ambiguities of lopsided economic progress." Pankaj Mishra in @harpers.bsky.social harpers.org/archive/2026...

"Lacan’s eldest daughter, Caroline, was killed in an accident in Antibes, and he and Millot returned to Paris. My mother later recalled that the news of Caroline’s death reached Lacan during the reception itself." Lacan in 1970s Tirana @grantamag.bsky.social granta.com/lacan-in-tir...

“I asked him where it came from. ‘Dubai,’ he replied.” Claire Wilmot in the @lrb.co.uk on the ‘Gold Rush’ in Tigray www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

“Prophets,” Giorgio Agamben's words whisper back to me, “admonish and denounce, but those who have seen the form that horror has taken in our times no longer want to blame or condemn, and our prophecy is today of this type.” My latest for @time.com from Baghdad. time.com/article/2026...

It’s 2026 and I still have no running water or electricity in Baghdad. State power supply is cut, and the neighborhood generator to which we pay around $200 a month has broken down in the heat. The water pump is silent, the faucet is dry. Well done, America.

‘Marcel Duchamp is still ubiquitous: we see endless variations on his old theme of the readymade object. The best cure for Duchamp fatigue, though, might be a large dose of the real thing.’ Hal Foster at MoMA. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘AK-47 and Guitar’ Rahmane Idrissa in the @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

“People said my car stank, but I couldn’t smell it,” said one, Bogdan Zuyakov. “That scared me. I don’t smell the bodies anymore.” www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/w...

‘This samurai suit is in the lighter 𝘥ō𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘶 (body-wrap) style. Originally worn by lower-rank samurai, it became increasingly common in the 16th century as warfare grew more mobile.’ Ben Walker at the British Museum. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Illuminating from Greg Grandin in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

There will be no shelter here tonight, only the long road to the land of strangers. Every house will be stripped and every roof caved in, as each man, woman, and child is made to bear on their back the sum of a life. A poem by Tarn MacArthur (@tarnnation.bsky.social). www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Paul Klee's lines go for a walk in the latest @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

The best thing to come from @equatormag.bsky.social since its inception. www.equator.org/articles/why...

The Granta controversy surrounding a Commonwealth Prize-winning story tells us less about AI than about the enduring metropolitan expectation that writing from the South should sound opaque, excessive, and primitive. africasacountry.com/2026/05/how-...

"Sackcloth 1953 thus evokes a wounded body as well (...) a proper composition should approach the perfection of the human figure. Burri radically disrupts this ancient model, as if to register a resentment against art, or even a discontent with civilization." www.theparisreview.org/blog/2026/05...

‘Baghdad, ghostlike.' My latest essay in the Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, alongside Nada Shabout, Zainab Bahrani, and others. intellectdiscover.com/content/jour...

The secretary of defense who stepped up to the Pentagon TV podium in 2025 seemed energized by his redemption. He cut a quintessentially American figure: “a pastless futureless man,” in Lasch’s terms, a born-again zealot, finally dispatched to the holy arena of his dreams.

"One said the U.S. government asked members of Iraq’s elite Counter Terrorism Service to help retrieve the fallen airmen." Very interesting. www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...

“My arm isn’t normal,” Rania says shyly, clutching her father. “So the other kids don’t like to play with me.”

‘Morale high, beards full and waistlines diminished’. The scene could have come from Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In fact, Marozzi admits that his venture into the Libyan desert was inspired by the early 19th-century travelogue of a British. Youssef Ben Ismail @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

On maritime conflicts old and new in @nybooks.com. www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

In NLR 158: Gaza as World Event. Nancy Fraser reads the global reverberations of Israel’s destruction of Gaza as a crisis point in the prevailing Western moral order. Reflections on neo-McCarthyism in Germany and the US. newleftreview.org/issues/ii158...

'And think of all the civilising we did.' Tom Stevenson in the new @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Walter Benjamin’s relations with the Frankfurt School were complicated. Adorno, a student of avant-garde music and literature eleven years younger than Benjamin, thought of Benjamin as his “only teacher”.’ Eli Zaretsky on the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...

On WB's grave in @eflux.bsky.social www.e-flux.com/journal/163/...

"I scarcely noticed anything about Venice, except the ubiquitous absence of Giorgio Agamben." Reading this beautiful essay in the @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social Basharat Peer was so generous to share with me last night. lareviewofbooks.org/article/wait...

“The landlord has messaged me and increased the rent by 30 percent for next year, though because of the war I might lose about 40 percent of my monthly income.” A special section in our new issue, FOREVER WARS, features a diary from Tehran, as well as dispatches from Beirut, Baghdad, and Ramallah.

Warplanes over Baghdad.

Iraq's final nadir. www.wsj.com/world/middle...

In NLR 158: Trump's Gulf War. Alexander Zevin on the US-Israeli war on Iran, as an uneasy balance holds between Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz and the enormous firepower of the aggressors. newleftreview.org/issues/ii158...

‘My Father's Shadow’ is a devastating, hauntingly beautiful picture.

Beautiful in the current @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Scores of farmers descended on Baghdad's Green Zone this morning, protesting its neoliberal polices and the death of their lands. One carried a pitchfork, a reminder of how they fought the British over a century ago. Water cannons and riot forces awaited, the seat of power must remain untouched.

Beautiful Tehran, despite all. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blyl...

— dispatches from Tehran (translated by @naghmehs.bsky.social), Beirut (@joelleabirached.bsky.social), Baghdad (@nabilsalih.bsky.social), and the West Bank (Raja Shehadeh) — @jlfeder.bsky.social documents the queer face of war in Ukraine — @arh12.bsky.social on Mary McCarthy’s Vietnam reporting

‘Baghdad, ghostlike.' My latest essay in the Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, alongside Nada Shabout, Zainab Bahrani, and others. intellectdiscover.com/content/jour...