Burning Forests, Burning Nations
Columnist Hadani Ditmars recounts meeting strangers at the beach during fire season in British Columbia and finds Syria and Turkey are shared homelands.
TMR 15 • FIRE
Fiction: The Settlement
From Tariq Mehmood comes an allegorical story with the strange beauty and simplicity of a tale by Ghassan Kanafani or J.M. Coetzee.
Climate Disasters Hasten the Advent of a World Refugee Crisis
Novelist Omar El Akkad ("What Strange Paradise", "American War") warns that wildfires and other climate disasters are creating the conditions for a global refugee crisis the world is not prepared for.
Killing Olive Trees Fails to Push Palestinians Out
Olive trees are majestic, they are the source of many livelihoods throughout Palestine, and they have too often been slashed and torched by Israeli settlers. Olive trees should never be pawns in a political supremacy game. Basil al-Adraa reports.
FIRE: An Abbreviated Reading List
Here are a few staff picks in a very short list that could benefit from having us add your own fire-related titles. Come on, light our fire.
Alchelmy and the Deaf Blacksmith of Amman
Munir Atalla, the Brooklyn-based writer-director, recounts the story of a rather unusually happy, earnest man with a handicap and a skill.
Poem: An Allegory for Our Times
Jenny Pollak, a poet in Australia, captures the unrelenting menace of a changing world.
Sacred Fire, Profane Fire: From Ritual to Barbecue
Bethlehem's top chef Fadi Kattan waxes enthusiastic on fire, grilling and the art of turning meat pink.
Diary of the Collapse: Charif Majdalani on Lebanon’s Trials by Fire
A.J. Naddaff reviews the latest work of creative nonfiction by Lebanon's Charif Majdalani, as his nation teeters on the edge of the abyss.
Reconsidering Thoreau in a Burning World
Megan Marshall on living with things lost in the Caldor Fire and revisiting Henry David Thoreau.
The Vanishing: Are Arab Christians an Endangered Minority?
Hadani Ditmars reviews Janine di Giovanni's ambitious new travelogue on beleaguered Christian communities in Iraq, Gaza, Syria, and Egypt.
House Arrest
Claire Berlinski I knew this lockdown business was serious when they cancelled my convocation. I had a convocation—a summons—to renew my carte de séjour. I had been told to present myself at exactly 8:35 a.m. at the Préfecture de Police in the IVe arrondissement on March 16th, 2020. The annual convocation at the…
The New Politics of Exclusion: Gaza as Prologue
Ivar Ekeland and Sara Roy A new kind of politics is emerging in Western democracies, perhaps best characterized by fragmentation. The political debate is increasingly digital, visual, and incoherent—without structure or boundaries—and therefore transitory and ephemeral. The historian Martin Conway argues1 that the longstanding political contract between the citizen—who voted,…
Prison Letters From a Free Spirit on Slow Death Row
Excerpts from Pen Pal: Prison Letters From a Free Spirit on Slow Death Row Tiyo Attallah Salah-El, edited by Paul Alan Smith Or Books (Sept. 2020) ISBN 9781682193044 Tiyo Attallah Salah-El died in 2018 on “Slow Death Row” while serving 43 years of a life sentence in a prison system he detested…
Guantánamo Voices: True Accounts From the World’s Most Infamous Prison
Excerpt from Guantánamo Voices: True Accounts From the World’s Most Infamous Prison A graphic novel, edited by Sarah Mirk, with an introduction by Omar El Akkad Abrams ComicArts (June 2020) ISBN 9781419746901 Sarah Mirk First let’s talk about language — is Guantánamo a prison? The language we use to describe…