The Wall We Can’t Tell You About
There are some walls we can't discuss freely and openly without inviting censure. This is one of them.
Essays
The Bathing Partition
In this creative exploration of identity and homelessness, Sheana Ochoa faces her own inner walls and travels to Auschwitz.
From Damascus to Birmingham, a Selected Glossary
Frances Zaid describes in epistolary fashion the language barriers in her blooming relationship (leading to marriage and kids) with a three-time refugee from the Yarmouk Camp.
The Labyrinth of Memory
Critic Ziad Suidan meditates on the meaning of the labyrinth and the walls that can separate us but also remind us of our shared history inside the hammam.
Panopticon of Kashmir
Ifat Gazia on her native Kashmir wonders why her family was uprooted, displaced and forced to live like homeless people in their own land.
Is Tel Aviv’s Neve Tzedek, Too, Occupied Territory?
Taylor Miller explores the aesthetics of gentrification and the "settler colonial hydra that continually displaces, erases, and reinscribes Palestinian space."
Between Thorns and Thistles in Bil’in
Muralist Francisco Letelier travels to the West Bank to help a Palestinian community confront the Occupation with art.
We Are All at the Border Now
Roving reporter Todd Miller, who has published four books exploring the world and its borders, questions the philosophy of walls.
Beautiful/Ugly: Against Aestheticizing Israel’s Separation Wall
Malu Halasa revisits the question of whether walls, borders and barriers should ever be dressed up to disguise their true intent.
Reviving Hammam Al Jadeed
Artist Tom Young who divides his time between Beirut and London, paints in Hammam Al Jadid during its revival after 70 years.
Dinner at the White House, in the Lion’s Den
Francisco Letelier searches for the truth about his father's assassination in Washington DC while excavating US government complicity in its cover-up.
The New Gatekeepers: How proprietary algorithms increasingly determine the news we see
Would you trust an algorithm to sell you a used car? Andy Lee Roth peers under the hood of Big Tech and finds plenty we should be worrying about.
On Literacy and the Lack Thereof
Marcus Gilroy-Ware, the author of After the Fact, The Truth About Fake News, warns that literacy and numeracy are on the wain.
The Short, Happy Life of Shirley Thompson
Novelist Preeta Samarasan believes that the greatest truths reside more often in fiction than in fact.
Poet in Pakistan: the Flamboyant Carolyn Kizer
Biographer Marian Janssen reveals the big, brash, blonde feminist writer and poet Carolyn Kizer, who fascinated and shocked Pakistanis—and introduced the ghazal to America.