Jimmy Kimmel hosted George W. Bush. They had good laughs about UFOs, in case America’s revolutionaries need a reminder. I wrote about it in @opendemocracy.net www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-afr...

"Violence does not disappear when order is established; it becomes diffuse or even invisible through its law-preserving functions, no matter how unjust, arbitrary, and cruel the law may be." Eric Reinhart on 'political violence' in @bostonreview.bsky.social www.bostonreview.net/articles/wha...

‘There is no medical training for this, no papers to help guide me.’ Mina Naguib on the hard lessons of medical care in Gaza. granta.com/impossible-r...

"The people will become real at last – but by then of course they will all be dead."

On the cold-blooded execution of alleged drug smugglers. www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Baghdad.

Layla al-Attar (1944-1993) Untitled, c. 1980

'How Europe covered up the assassination of Palestinians on its territory' by Alain Gresh in @orientxxi.bsky.social orientxxi.info/lu-vu-entend...

"The Naked City is not, however, just a noirish police procedural but a love letter to an ineffable place alternatively known as the modern Babylon, the city that never sleeps, and Baghdad-on-the-Subway." Brenda Wineapple on New York in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

"A prisoner who claimed to have been a cellmate once suggested that Prigozhin became the sexual plaything of an inmate who was part of the mafia underworld." Joshua Hammer in the current issue of the @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Shelia Fitzpatrick on 'cultures of denunciations' from Moscow to Washington in the @lrb.co.uk. Decades after the walls that had ears in Saddam's Iraq crumbled, today's MoI has a "report service" for "decadent" content and what troubles societal stability on its website. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The outrages and atrocities fall like leaves, uncountable, ungathered; we're left with a residue of powerlessness and shame Pic by Abed Rahim Khatib. In Gaza, the body of one-month-old Majed Mohammed Zarab, thought to have starved to death, is brought to his funeral

"He told me, once, that he regretted his support for the Iraq war terribly, that it was the biggest mistake of his career. He’d been swept up...by the mood of the times." A former @newyorker.com fact-checker speaks: 'House Arab' www.bidoun.org/articles/hou...

‘Wertheimer was Sargent’s sixth painting of a Jewish subject; he would paint 29 more. Altogether, if we include his charcoal portraits, some 70 of his sitters were Jewish, around 5 per cent.’ Abigail Green on John Singer Sargent’s relationship with the Wertheimers: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

So pervasive is the suspicion that Mossad has penetrated all aspects of government that one post on X declared, “Call the Tehran gas company right now and someone picks up saying ‘Shalom, how can I help you?’” Christopher de Bellaigue in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

"I traveled to Pie de la Cuesta, in Guerrero, to find you. I looked out at the sea that probably swallowed you and I sense a storm: it’s you. For you I would cover the sea in white flowers." @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

“Anyone who rejoices over what happened in Sana’a must review his faith and Yemeni identity.” Helen Lackner in @jacobinmag.bsky.social jacobin.com/2025/09/yeme...

“Most people did not assume that there is a modern, contemporary culture and artists working” in Iraq, said Nada Shabout. @vanessahlarson.bsky.social in the @washingtonpost.com washingtonpost.com/entertainment/art/2025/09/11/baghdad-modern-art-iraq-war-bard-college/?itid=sf_style_toptable_1_0

"They talk all at once, or individually, or sometimes fall silent together. The crackling voices of those left behind deepen their fears. Outside the days spool, like the endless credits of a film they have never seen." Ilija Trojanow, beautifully, in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

'ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.' Raymond Geuss on 'Gallia and Gaza' in the @newleftreview.bsky.social newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

‘By the waters of Zion, there we sat down, and there we wept, when we remembered Babylon.’ Samuel Hayim Brody in @bostonreview.bsky.social www.bostonreview.net/articles/in-...

Anahid Nersessian on 'Schattenfroh' and Düren’s “book of the dead,” which reminds me of Sinan Antoon's 'The Book of Collateral Damage' and the impossibility of cataloging all that was lost in the first minute of the war on Iraq. In @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Baghdad is a graveyard for Baghdad, and I’m in perpetual mourning.

“[Awdah Hathaleen’s] death was exceptional only because his killing’s extensive documentation and his acclaim as an activist…. Most Palestinians who die as a result of Israel’s control will never be mourned as widely.” —Joseph Kaplan Weinger

In the new @LRB, I went to El Salvador, where Nayib Bukele has mopped up the gangs and set up Washington's favourite prison state. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

One thing I miss the most after moving from New York to Baghdad is not making the morning walk to the post office (broken here since the 2003 invasion) to receive my copy of the latest @nybooks.com.

"The more fundamental problem, though, is that both diplomats and development workers refused to engage with South Sudan as it actually existed, rather than the place they wished it to be." Joshua Craze in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

‘Everything was deadly, but we did not die.’ Selma Dabbagh in @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

“We will spare you so that you die of grief.” Ghaith Abdul-Ahad in Syria for @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

For Sidecar, Erika Balsom on Kamal Aljafari’s new film 'With Hasan in Gaza': 'Against all these crimes of extermination, every second of this documentary is an archive of presence, demanding recognition and remembrance.' newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

We go to drink some maté at Don Pablo’s house. He tells us that when the cemetery flooded, coffins floated up to his house regularly. “Like little boats,” he says. Mariana Enríquez in @parisreview.bsky.social www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/08...

Originaire de Bagdad, Nabil Salih est écrivain et photographe. Il revient sur les profondes transformations de Bagdad, capitale millénaire, désormais ravagée par les guerres successives et l’imposition d’un libéralisme agressif et débridé. » comptoir.org/2024/12/10/n...

Paris-Baghdad.

‪ 'it just eats me alive.’ @melissacrt.bsky.social in Tbilisi for @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/au...

Bridges collapsed, as Beat poet Sargon Boulus once wrote, “like the ribs of a murdered God over the Tigris and the Euphrates.” My latest in @jacobinmag.bsky.social jacobin.com/2025/08/pres...

One way dissent on Palestine is often expressed is through graffiti. One morning, on a walk through Kreuzberg, I saw an unusual recommendation from a graffiti artist: ‘Read Nahum Goldmann’s Jewish Paradox.’ Adam Shatz from Berlin in @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

From ‘Then the Fog’, a poem by @joriegraham.bsky.social. Read here: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

"The memory of 1988 was heavy in the air." Amir Ahmadi Arian on Tehran's Evin Prison in @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

On Veronese, "a sovereign balsam for our own hard times." Ingrid D. Rowland in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

On Jacques Rozier, “the Nouvelle Vague all alone.” @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

‘Paris was Agnès Varda’s working milieu for most of her life. She approached it at times like a canny native informant, at others like a child enchanted by a circus whose routines changed from one arrondissement to the next or season by season.’ Jeremy Harding: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

"She was just seven months old. Bones like flower petals" On Hiroshima, Atsuyuki Matsuo, art, and "the End We Refuse to Imagine" in @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I gather you snap your fingers in the face of the east wind feel the moon groan as she learns the ropes again tangled among branches that you bend, so you say, to shake her free. ‘Considering a Hike to Yon Tree’, a poem by Kathleen Jamie: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Dunya Mikhail.

Very proud to have been editor on this piece. Please read:

I wrote this essay about seeing a photograph of my mother, who passed away on this day in 2021. It will be reprinted by @markaz-review.bsky.social in their September issue: 'The Best of The Markaz Review, v 1, 2025'. themarkaz.org/regarding-th...

Visiting the United States in 1960, Italo Calvino noted the growing “abyss” between America and the rest of the world (...) and wondered whether the price for such plenitude was a “death of the soul.” Pankaj Mishra in @harpers.bsky.social harpers.org/archive/2025...

"The Mahdi’s tomb in Omdurman, largely destroyed by artillery in 1898, was restored – though not his bones, which the British had thrown into the river." Jonathan Parry writes on 'Britain in Sudan' in @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Shiʿr Magazine from the summer of the 1967 Naksa, featuring editor Yusuf al-Khal, the critic-artist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke. Kamal Boullata is the cover artist. Mahmoud Darwish opens the issue with a poem smuggled from prison: “Has your horse fallen, Saladin?”

"Have we no shame?" @selmadabbagh.bsky.social on Gaza for @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ju...