Samar says that she too used to have a heart of stone
She treated war injuries as a medical student during Lebanon’s civil war, and her patients became their injuries: names and numbers. But then she had children and things changed. Now, she says, she can’t handle the blood, the gore, any of it.
July 23, 2026
Wednesday evening. It’s time to go to the pub!
July 23, 2026
Astoria, this small clot of North Africa in the West, had naturally become the fan zone of choice.
July 20, 2026
Everyone wanted to talk, and most people wanted to take me on a tour of their favorite cracks.
A town ninety miles north of the Arctic Circle does not need two city halls, two high schools, and two fire stations. To establish a new city, the old one must die, and this project to destroy and rebuild central Kiruna—known as the “urban” or “social transformation”—has now been ongoing for more than two decades.
July 17, 2026
But the chant, I finally realized, wasn’t just a single-vowel utterance. It was an imperative: “Ro!”
July 16, 2026
Palpable in the team’s vulnerable performance was a feeling that this tournament was going to be especially beleaguered
Thirty-one years after the birth of its democracy, South Africa remains plagued by the ghosts of colonization and Apartheid and continues to reproduce the same violence it sought to overcome.
July 15, 2026
The long wait for the elusive sixth title at the World Cup has successfully destroyed the faith of many of Brazil’s most stalwart football nationalists
Somewhere in the fifty-second minute, as the ball is passed calmly around Brazil’s back four, fireworks erupt down the street. In confusion, I look to my partner, who seems to have understood something that I have not—courtesy of Bahia’s inconsistent internet services, our broadcast is delayed. He’s on his feet, ecstatic: “It’s a goal for Brazil!”
July 9, 2026
“I need to know what being Canadian means”
The Dove Fresh Clubhouse offers a series of photo ops after which you can take a misty refreshing shower and treat yourself to a stick of deodorant; Home Depot presents “David Beckham’s Backyard” which does not look like what you might imagine David Beckham’s backyard would look like, or any backyard really, but you can get your face painted in Home Depot–swatched colors (one imagines a child sweatily choosing between eggshell and ecru).
July 7, 2026
What exactly are we living through: CANMEXUS 2026? USA & Former Allies 2026? Our very own annus infantinus?
On the field, every World Cup is a contest of idioms: between the Spanish-influenced juego de posición and post-German Gegenpressing, between philosophies that rely on holding the ball and those that assert themselves by working without it, between the set piece-heavy structuralism now fashionable in the English Premier League and the crashing unpredictability of the South American game. At an official level, however, the World Cup’s cacophony of on-field styles cedes to a party-pooper monolingualism.
June 23, 2026
The idea of buying Greenland is less a historical deviation than a revival of a longstanding practice of buying sovereignty, one that goes hand in hand with the expropriation of land by force
Denying that history could have been otherwise or making conquest subject to some unwritten statute of limitations are both ways of cloaking not just the US’s imperial past but its continuation into the present, with or without Kalaallit Nunaat. Buying Greenland was more than a threat to NATO, it was a threat to make American empire visible again.
June 23, 2026
It's fitting that MoU is only one letter removed from IOU
Tacitly or openly, officials and observers on all sides of the deal—even those who otherwise seem to inhabit different universes—acknowledge that the US has lost the war. And should the war resume, as Israel hopes, the US will lose again. “You can’t kill your way out of . . . every national security problem”; but you can sure as hell die trying.
March 26, 2026
The destruction is real. Israel and the US are deindustrializing Iran.
