Nabil Salih

Give him a prize! Open access // by Benoît Bréville (Le Monde diplomatique - English edition, November 2025)

For 50 years, the Nobel committee has rejected the candidacies of dissidents from the Western world. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have worked for peace in a different way from Machado. But they possess one flaw: they expose our own dirty secrets.

Soraya Antonius’s Portrait of a Lost Palestine by Selma Dabbagh November 14, 2025 – “With her pen, Antonius rebuilds villages and cities, replants crops, observes the weather, curates national festivals, and depicts both Palestinian and British high society.”

"It was on a visit home to Jerusalem in 1951 that Katy introduced Soraya, now studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, to the novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who encouraged her to write."

@selmadabbagh.bsky.social in the @parisreview.bsky.social
www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/11...

Mixed Blessings | Sophie Pinkham Uzbekistan has a new biennial, but how many of its aesthetic possibilities are underwritten by authoritarianism?

"The foot-tall apparitions leaped from one wall to the next, like ghosts insisting on telling their stories."

Beautiful in the @nybooks.com on the Bukhara Biennial, its relics of Soviet architecture, and Uzbek politics old and new.
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Jorie Graham · Poem: ‘Demonstration’

If you can hear me there,
if this reaches you

@joriegraham.bsky.social, whose words I long to read, in the @lrb.co.uk
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The Apolitical Life | Adam Kirsch The philosopher Giorgio Agamben exalts an ideal of what he calls “inoperativity”—a kind of passivity as an antidote to the West’s politics of power and domination.

On Agamben in the current @nybooks.com
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

'We Want to Breathe'—Dispatch from Gabes, Tunisia A few weeks into the 2025 school year, in a middle school in Chott Essalem, Tunisia, students began to feel dizzy and light-headed and their throats tightened. Within minutes, they began collapsing, o...

"Bourguiba’s prediction proved eerily accurate. Gabes did become unrecognizable, though not in the way he had promised."

@merip.bsky.social
www.merip.org/2025/11/we-w...

Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco • Articles • EQUATOR How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart

New: for @equatormag.bsky.social I spent months talking to BBC journalists, from front-line reporters to the former head of the World Service, about how the corporation came unstuck over Gaza. But as I was working on the story, it collided with something... bigger... www.equator.org/articles/ins...

The New Baghdad | Nabil Salih The ghost of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra may still prowl Princesses’ Street by night, but hardly anyone in this affluent neighborhood in western Baghdad would

I've written on Baghdad in the @nybooks.com, and more will follow in @merip.bsky.social and the 'The Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World'.
www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

‘Restorative Justice’: Beirut’s Struggle with Truth Heritage in Lebanon is not just about aesthetics; it is about truth

On Beirut in @artreview.bsky.social, a story similar to Baghdad's, where development hardly meets resistance, serving the butchers-cum-elites to enforce amnesia, exorcise the ghost Saddam Hussein, and erect a city over a city in their own name, murdering histories.
artreview.com/restorative-...

Much is being written on Tuesday's elections in Iraq, most is lazy and flawed, failing to grasp the gravity of the situation. Some parachute from Doha and New York and readily volunteer as propagandists for al-Sudani and the state. Independents are unheard of; locals on mute. A stain on journalism.

Making Up an Escape | Alex Ransom Since her career began in the mid-1990s, Kelly Reichardt has directed nine feature films, all modest in scope and budget and often willfully disinterested

"Sooner or later he has to fall down to earth."

On Reichardt's 'The Mastermind' in @nybooks.com
www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Come Rain, Come Down ‘It feels as though Bombay has invented rain for itself.’ Yash Sheth’s photography from Mumbais monsoon season, introduced by Ruchir Joshi.

Yash Sheth's photographs in the current, monumental issue of @grantamag.bsky.social, beautifully introduced by Ruchir Joshi.
granta.com/come-rain-co...

Cluster bomblets landed on my family’s garden in 2003. That’s all I need to say.

His Works Completed, Dick Cheney, Mass Murderer of Iraqis and American Democracy, Dies As much as the Trumpists claim to disavow the War on Terror, they walk a path paved by the most powerful vice president in US history.

On Cheney on his final descent to hell.
www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Long before occupying Baghdad, as defense secretary, Dick Cheney, now deceased former vice president, defended the bombing of al-Amiriyah Bomb Shelter, where my great aunt and her children were incinerated at dawn in 1991. If there is hell, that's where he is going tonight. Waiting for Bush!

Blood spilled in Sudan can be seen from space. Nobody can feign ignorance about what’s going on | Nesrine Malik The massacres carried out by the RSF in El Fasher, Darfur, with the support of its UAE sponsors, will only stop when the international community acts, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik

On El Fasher in @theguardian.com
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Looking back to see the present through the Grand Egyptian Museum In a recent interview broadcast on the Saudi Al-Arabiya channel, former Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, the former official of the ancient regime who barely makes it to the public sphere today, spoke a...

Important from Mada Masr on Egypt's new museum.
www.madamasr.com/en/2025/11/0...

Mohammed Sami Declan Long covers Mohammed Sami’s “To Whom it May Concern” at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, where the Iraqi artist’s work depicts communication methods in a state of limbo.

"Memories of life in Iraq remain foundational to Sami’s art. But with each measured allusion to Saddam-era tyranny or regime-change turmoil, we detect an anxious impulse to withhold, mask, or deflect."

@artforum.com
www.artforum.com/events/moham...

How Saudi Arabia and Qatar Benefited From Rule Changes to Reach the World Cup

Qatar and Saudi Arabia have used their wealth and influence to tilt the football world in their favour, but now, for the first time, they have tilted the playing field too.

Story on how opaque rule changes that paved Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s path to 2026 World Cup

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/w...

King of the Aral Sea • Articles • EQUATOR A Central Asian travelogue, translated from Chinese by Dylan Levi King

"When the Soviet Union disintegrated, Bout reinvented himself as an arms dealer, selling weapons to Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and running guns for rebel groups in Africa. Eventually, he bought a mansion on the water in the United Arab Emirates."

@equatormag.bsky.social
www.equator.org/articles/kin...

Matthew Carr · In Arica: The Chinchorro Mummies The Chinchorro, who inhabited a 400-mile stretch of the Pacific coast of Chile from around 7000 BCE, lived in small,...

‘the mummies of the long-buried and forgotten aborigines rose to the surface’ in ‘a sitting posture, facing the sea’. It seemed ‘to our excited imagination’, he went on, ‘as if the day of judgment had come’.

Matthew Carr in the @lrb.co.uk
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The people want to breathe In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself. africasacountry.com/2025/10/the-...

An alternative history of NATO expansion Subscribers // by Hélène Richard (Le Monde diplomatique - English edition, November 2025)

‘We have humiliated them too much … the situation in Russia is very dangerous … one day there will be a … nationalist backlash.’

@mondediplo.com
mondediplo.com/2025/11/06nato

The Abraham Accords and Sudan’s Global Counterrevolution On October 23, 2020, Sudan became the third Arab-majority country to normalize relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords. The deal between Israel and the civilian-military Sudanese Transitional...

"The UAE is ripping a page out of the playbook of nineteenth century imperialism, as it deliberately under-develops and exploits Africa and Africans and empowers authoritarian regimes in the region that enable its worldwide profiteering."

@merip.bsky.social
www.merip.org/2025/10/the-...

The Spiritual Jazz of Alice Coltrane | Adam Shatz Alice Coltrane reinvented her adoptive Hinduism by interweaving it with the music of the Black church.

I’m not a believer but I very much believe in the power of Alice Coltrane’s work. In the new @nybooks.com I write her musical and spiritual journey. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Two Years of Genocide • Articles • EQUATOR In Gaza City, people are slowly returning, pitching their tents over the ashes of homes that are nothing but dust

"My dreams, once experienced in color, have turned grey."

Sondos Sabra's dispatch from the crime scene in the @equatormag.bsky.social
www.equator.org/articles/two...

Two Poems • Articles • EQUATOR

"There was a line about a red-haired girl in Jaffa
and eating plums, and silverware – remember?"

Aria Aber, beautifully, in the @equatormag.bsky.social
www.equator.org/articles/two...

Em Hogan · An Anchor and a Cross: Tattoo Me The notion of the tattoo as something concealed – waiting to be uncovered – lends it an erotic quality. The...

Scholars assumed they were ‘dancing girls’ and the description stuck: as late as 1948 the Egyptologist Louis Keimer described them as ‘prostitutes of dubious morality’.

Em Hogan in the @lrb.co.uk
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Michael Wood · At the Movies: ‘L’Histoire de Souleymane’

‘Who wrote this story for you?’

Michael Wood on ‘L’Histoire de Souleymane’, which you should see, in the latest @lrb.co.uk
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Asim Qureshi · Short Cuts: Misuses of the Terrorism Act Thousands of people each year are detained and questioned under Schedule 7, the majority of them from ethnic minority...

‘If the officer asks me, ‘How many times a day do you pray?’ (I have been asked this) and I refuse to answer, my silence becomes a terrorist offence for which I could be prosecuted.’

Asim Qureshi on misuses of the Terrorism Act:

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...