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December 16, 2024
In Ruins | Archaeological Warfare in the West Bank
Jasper Nathaniel
On the quiet afternoon of March 5, 2024 in the northern occupied West Bank, I watched as a convoy of Israeli military jeeps drove along a narrow, winding road lined with terraced olive groves, passing the remnants of at least ten major civilizations dating back to the Bronze Age, to the summit of the tallest hill in Sebastia, a Palestinian village of about four thousand people. Near the hilltop archaeological...
December 11, 2024
On the Grid | How Surveillance Became a Love Language
Zoë Hitzig
A full-page ad in a November 1990 issue of Fortune magazine features two dozen men in dark suits turned away from the viewer. Standing in neat rows, most blend together in a uniform mass. But three are singled out, with red targets pinned to their backs. The text below the shadowy tableau reads: “Wouldn’t it be great if new customers were this easy to spot? Now they can be.” Bullseye....
December 9, 2024
Theater of Warning | Living Through Israel’s Attacks on Lebanon
Zeead Yaghi
The airstrikes came like clockwork. Every day between September 19 and November 26, the Israeli Defense Force’s Arabic spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, posted a series of “warnings” on X, mapping that night’s planned attacks on Beirut’s southern suburbs. Targeted buildings were colored in red, and the accompanying messages instructed residents to evacuate. Adraee’s announcements were highly descriptive. Often, he used colloquial or informal names of streets and buildings, and included details...
December 3, 2024
Whose Weil? | Simone, Patron Saint of Everyone
Jack Hanson
During the First World War, a six-year-old Simone Weil learned that soldiers on the Western Front were not rationed sugar, so she refused to eat it until conditions improved. But whereas most leave such zealous empathy in childhood, Weil’s commitment to suffering with — or, at least, in the same way as — others became the hallmark of her work as a philosopher and political activist, as well as of...
November 21, 2024
The Free State | Fiction
Ella Fox-Martens
The way he finds out that Antjie is dead is through a short, harried phone call with his uncle Pieter, who rings him from the side of the road in Maritzburg. Traffic roars by, cutting out his words at inopportune moments. Pieter has to say “body” three times before Jaco understands. After the conversation, during which he mindlessly and methodically tears each page out of his roommate’s nearby notebook, Jaco...
November 12, 2024
Editors’ Note | Country Over Party
The Editors
Joe Biden’s first campaign for president, in the 1988 election cycle, met with a swift and ignominious demise. The Delaware senator’s attempts to cast himself as the candidate of youth and change — the standard-bearer of the “Pepsi Generation,” a Kennedy for the ’80s — fell flat. (Perhaps voters had some premonition of the senescent egomaniac we know today.) Three months after the campaign’s launch, the scandals, or, more precisely,...
November 4, 2024
Borderlands, Betrayed | How Hispanic Democrats Abandoned Progressivism in South Texas
Gabriel Antonio Solis
In February, before the Democrats swapped candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump separately visited Texas on the same day to present their respective plans for cracking down on border crossing. In Eagle Pass, Trump walked along a razor-wire fence, telling Border Patrol agents — and TV cameras — that the country was “being overrun” by “Biden migrant crime.” Biden, standing in front of another Border Patrol group a few hundred...
October 30, 2024
Lipstick on the Pigs | Kamala Harris and the Lineage of the Female Cop
Sophie Lewis
The meming into existence of candidate Harris that took place online this summer featured a fantasy of the vice president as a steely feminine version of Marvel vigilante Captain America, un-fuck-with-able in the iconic spangled blue superhero uniform. In one image, an A.I.-generated Captain Kamala faces off against a certain orange-hued — now orange jumpsuited — prisoner. Her own sleek bodysuit sparkles with sheriff’s stars at the belt buckle and...
July 19, 2024
The Ink in the Inkwell | Literature of the Black Resort Town
Melvin Backman
In the third chapter of Vinson Cunningham’s debut novel, Great Expectations, David Hammond finds himself on Martha’s Vineyard, fundraising among friendly wallets vacationing on-island. He is an aide to an unnamed Barack Obama stand-in (“the Senator”) who is campaigning for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president. As Karen Cox, the bundler David is boarding with, counts out sixty thousand dollars in checks — “twice my salary,” he notes — she...
July 19, 2024
Reading Oneself | Auto-Critics and the Sylvia Plath Problem
Frances Lindemann
There are at least two Sylvia Plaths. One was born on October 27, 1932 in Jamaica Plain, Boston. This Sylvia Plath summered on the Massachusetts coastline and loved to swim. She was obsessed with baking; interested in mythology; equally determined and ambitious when it came to losing her virginity, getting straight A’s, and publishing in The New Yorker. She was a star literature student at Smith College, when she also...
