‘If de Bellaigue’s Suleyman reveals the occasional spark of fairness, the men who serve him are all darkness. Justice is a commodity sold to the highest bidder or the most geriatric mullah.’ Helen Pfeifer questions a new biography of Suleyman the Great: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

My Baghdad dispatch in the December issue of the German @mondediplo.com:

"The Pentagon, impressed with Museveni’s military acumen, offered him lucrative partnership opportunities in the global war on terror. His forces have since been deployed (...) as security guards in Iraq, eventually taking over many jobs from US forces." @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

In the current @nybooks.com from Christopher de Bellaigue on Modi and Indians' agonies behind the sheen and din of 'Viksit Bharat'. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

In the @lrb.co.uk, an excellent walkthrough from Vienna to shadowing the open chasm in Gaza, through Tunis and Algiers. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

"We had a chance to not sell ourselves out. We had a chance, and we blew it. This did not end well, and still we can choose to begin again, tilting – collectively, contingently – toward the pitch of liberation." David Velasco in @equatormag.bsky.social www.equator.org/articles/how...

My latest in @bostonreview.bsky.social, edited by Cameron Avery. www.bostonreview.net/articles/bag...

What do Venezuela, Iraq, and Iran (and Greenland) have in common?

Dark days in Baghdad. I urge everyone to keep an eye. www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/20...

In the latest episode of the podcast, Sepideh Farsia talks to @adamshatz.bsky.social about her film, ‘Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk’, about the life of Fatma Hassona, a Palestinian photographer who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in April 2025. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

My latest in @time.com from Baghdad. time.com/7337374/iraq...

I have Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine' with me here in Baghdad. Indispensable. I have also long waited for Equator, had the pleasure of previously working with some of its editors, and expressed my interest in writing for them. But I do wonder if this is how the magazine lives up to its mission.

Listening in Baghdad. No words.

"Vallejo’s life has the brief, jagged outline of a broken mirror. He resembles a 19th-century poète maudit, a Beddoes, a Bécquer, a Baudelaire, a Rimbaud. He is a poetry touchstone, a poet-martyr." In the new @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

US peace plan: What could Ukraine compromise on? We look at issues where differences will be extremely difficult to bridge and others where compromise may prove less hard to find. www.ft.com/content/c24e... via @FT

"Palestinians will struggle to remain even in the 47 percent of Gaza still accessible to them. That may well, in fact, be precisely what the current reconstruction plans are meant to achieve." @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

On Mariupol in the @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/w...

"Josefina climbed down a wooden ladder into the pit and ran a finger along the vertebrae. Then she closed her eyes, whispered something and kissed the skull. I felt that I shouldn’t be watching and went for a walk around the graveyard." Stephen Phelan in the @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

On Godard in @eflux.bsky.social www.e-flux.com/notes/678342...

"The colours of these clothes – several greys and dark blues, a dash of turquoise green and a bright red – break the heart. They allude to a life outside of this nightmare." On Titian, Abu Ghraib, and Gaza in the @equatormag.bsky.social www.equator.org/articles/pit...

‘We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side’, he told a television audience, insisting that victory required spending ‘time in the shadows’.

Unbelievable. Iraq closer to the World Cup. 2-1 over the Emirates in Basra. Football, for once, triumphs for the poor. “This is how the besieged play,” goes a 1990s song. Behold.

For 50 years, the Nobel committee has rejected the candidacies of dissidents from the Western world. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have worked for peace in a different way from Machado. But they possess one flaw: they expose our own dirty secrets.

"It was on a visit home to Jerusalem in 1951 that Katy introduced Soraya, now studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, to the novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who encouraged her to write." @selmadabbagh.bsky.social in the @parisreview.bsky.social www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/11...

"The foot-tall apparitions leaped from one wall to the next, like ghosts insisting on telling their stories." Beautiful in the @nybooks.com on the Bukhara Biennial, its relics of Soviet architecture, and Uzbek politics old and new. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

If you can hear me there, if this reaches you @joriegraham.bsky.social, whose words I long to read, in the @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

On Agamben in the current @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

"Bourguiba’s prediction proved eerily accurate. Gabes did become unrecognizable, though not in the way he had promised." @merip.bsky.social www.merip.org/2025/11/we-w...

New: for @equatormag.bsky.social I spent months talking to BBC journalists, from front-line reporters to the former head of the World Service, about how the corporation came unstuck over Gaza. But as I was working on the story, it collided with something... bigger... www.equator.org/articles/ins...

On Beirut in @artreview.bsky.social, a story similar to Baghdad's, where development hardly meets resistance, serving the butchers-cum-elites to enforce amnesia, exorcise the ghost Saddam Hussein, and erect a city over a city in their own name, murdering histories. artreview.com/restorative-...

Much is being written on Tuesday's elections in Iraq, most is lazy and flawed, failing to grasp the gravity of the situation. Some parachute from Doha and New York and readily volunteer as propagandists for al-Sudani and the state. Independents are unheard of; locals on mute. A stain on journalism.

"Sooner or later he has to fall down to earth." On Reichardt's 'The Mastermind' in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Yash Sheth's photographs in the current, monumental issue of @grantamag.bsky.social, beautifully introduced by Ruchir Joshi. granta.com/come-rain-co...

On Cheney on his final descent to hell. www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Long before occupying Baghdad, as defense secretary, Dick Cheney, now deceased former vice president, defended the bombing of al-Amiriyah Bomb Shelter, where my great aunt and her children were incinerated at dawn in 1991. If there is hell, that's where he is going tonight. Waiting for Bush!

On El Fasher in @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Important from Mada Masr on Egypt's new museum. www.madamasr.com/en/2025/11/0...

"Memories of life in Iraq remain foundational to Sami’s art. But with each measured allusion to Saddam-era tyranny or regime-change turmoil, we detect an anxious impulse to withhold, mask, or deflect." @artforum.com www.artforum.com/events/moham...

Qatar and Saudi Arabia have used their wealth and influence to tilt the football world in their favour, but now, for the first time, they have tilted the playing field too. Story on how opaque rule changes that paved Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s path to 2026 World Cup www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/w...

"When the Soviet Union disintegrated, Bout reinvented himself as an arms dealer, selling weapons to Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and running guns for rebel groups in Africa. Eventually, he bought a mansion on the water in the United Arab Emirates." @equatormag.bsky.social www.equator.org/articles/kin...

‘the mummies of the long-buried and forgotten aborigines rose to the surface’ in ‘a sitting posture, facing the sea’. It seemed ‘to our excited imagination’, he went on, ‘as if the day of judgment had come’. Matthew Carr in the @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself. africasacountry.com/2025/10/the-...

‘We have humiliated them too much … the situation in Russia is very dangerous … one day there will be a … nationalist backlash.’ @mondediplo.com mondediplo.com/2025/11/06nato

"The UAE is ripping a page out of the playbook of nineteenth century imperialism, as it deliberately under-develops and exploits Africa and Africans and empowers authoritarian regimes in the region that enable its worldwide profiteering." @merip.bsky.social www.merip.org/2025/10/the-...

I’m not a believer but I very much believe in the power of Alice Coltrane’s work. In the new @nybooks.com I write her musical and spiritual journey. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

"My dreams, once experienced in color, have turned grey." Sondos Sabra's dispatch from the crime scene in the @equatormag.bsky.social www.equator.org/articles/two...

"There was a line about a red-haired girl in Jaffa and eating plums, and silverware – remember?" Aria Aber, beautifully, in the @equatormag.bsky.social www.equator.org/articles/two...

Scholars assumed they were ‘dancing girls’ and the description stuck: as late as 1948 the Egyptologist Louis Keimer described them as ‘prostitutes of dubious morality’. Em Hogan in the @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Who wrote this story for you?’ Michael Wood on ‘L’Histoire de Souleymane’, which you should see, in the latest @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘If the officer asks me, ‘How many times a day do you pray?’ (I have been asked this) and I refuse to answer, my silence becomes a terrorist offence for which I could be prosecuted.’ Asim Qureshi on misuses of the Terrorism Act: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...