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Essay

Notes on Going Viral

By May 15, 2026
What I dream of, then, when I think about what Jürgen Habermas called “the postsecular society,” is a foggy middle path. I’m not willing to fall for the false choice between religion and democracy simply because either feels like more solid footing than walking the tightrope between them.

Snow

By May 15, 2026
Each country has laid claim to the Kashmir Valley as their own, while its people struggle for self-determination.

Who Can I Dance With?

By February 15, 2026
From sneaking into underground basements in Tehran [...] to learning to dance with almost no words in Northern California, I had done everything I could.

Letting Go

By February 15, 2026
In “Letting Go,” J. Malcolm Garcia moves between personal mourning and geopolitical aftermath, tracing how the U.S. immigration system fails the very people whose loyalty and labor the U.S. government once depended on.
Egg, Andrew Walker

Puncture → Burst

By October 22, 2025
My throat still burns when I think about that summer… It burns all the way down, as if I’ve swallowed something scalding, a thick syrup of fear’s reduction.

In Search of Ouologuem

By September 17, 2025
My journey—on the surface, an attempt to trace my heritage—had in fact been driven all along by a deep longing to meet the man and hear his story.

Clayton

By August 15, 2025
Clayton’s friendliness kept me from looking straight ahead and waiting for the light to change.

Aquaduhka

By May 19, 2025
Mothers and young children, however, recreate an original and innovative language… a form of communication that exists outside of hierarchies. Babble is “an overlooked path of insurgency.”

The Grind

By April 15, 2025
“Say it with me!” he leans over in the dark, and grips the sides of his steering wheel like a neck. “They—deserve—to die!”

Joli Petit Accent

By March 17, 2025
“Growing up, moving between the United States and Palestine made me feel as if I shed one self and inhabited another, over and over again.”
Legendary Musicians of Karachi collection

Iggy

By Osman Samiuddin, guest-edited by Kamila Shamsie February 19, 2025
I was looking for a trace, a whiff, a rumor—anything that would bring alive the greatest guitarist you’d never heard about.
paint can by blue wall

Déja Vû

By November 6, 2023
It had been sixty years since Mommy Mae left Tchula, Mississippi for Chicago, and she still believed that education was a salve for the systemically bruised. I wasn’t as sure, but journeyed to Iowa City on the fuel of her faith.

Extraction

By January 9, 2023
When your great-grandparents grew up in Stalin’s terror-famine, your grandparents in the Holocaust, and your parents in a straddle between totalitarianism and democracy, you grew up confused about pain. Were you entitled to it? Was it real?

Safety Town

By June 20, 2022
These whimsical miniature street systems are at the heart of what my mom thinks is vital and good. They are utopias she is building — strange, if somewhat boring, microparadises where everyone obeys traffic laws.

Malali and Me

By Aliyeh Ataei, translated from the Persian by Salar Abdoh May 31, 2022
Motherland was something without content or form, something utterly abstract — something that, in relation to a country like this, could only occupy the minds of those who’d never had it.

Boys Will Be

By February 28, 2022
I let myself believe that we felt the same defiance, the same degree of angry and powerless and omnipotent and free.
a sailor selling a nostrum by the sea

Hosts

By January 27, 2022
Hospitality is never simple: it will always require me to yield some control over my body or space to another’s desires.