In an interview with writer and human rights investigator Michael Shaikh on food’s significance to communal memory and its weaponization in conflict zones, he notes: “Food is a language of implication. It’s not always as precise as the written or spoken version. But it can be equally profound.” His reporting—from Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, to postwar Eelam Tamil communities in Sri Lanka, to the highlands of Afghanistan—opens our July–August issue with a testament to the role of cooks as “living libraries” and the political weight of what is passed from hand to hand. From there, the question of how the individual and the collective refract politically, interpersonally, and culturally threads through our July-August issue.

In fiction, Argentine artist and filmmaker Amalia Ulman’s darkly funny story “The German Teacher,” follows a woman whose first day as a debt collector collides with the ghost of a high school scandal—Ulman’s comic voice edged with sincerity as the cobradora de frac, in her impersonal uniform, discovers that the “individual” on her docket is none other than the teacher she once loved and ruined.

In nonfiction, Stokley Towles’s essay “Clayton,” set in San Antonio where the unhoused are rendered systemically invisible, pries open the tacit street choreography of not-seeing, as a ‘hello’ turns into an account of slow recognition: birthdays remembered, favors extended, and systems faced side by side. Meanwhile, Vanessa Micale’s lyrical essay “Boca del Lobo” braids her family’s history of domestic violence with her work at the border, moving from childhood kitchens to Bad Bunny to ask what beauty and music can salvage.

Our Global Spotlights section, for the first time, features a photo essay: the Rohingyatography Collective’s “Weathering the Monsoons: Eid-ul-Adha in the Rohingya Camps.” Documenting Eid as it arrives with flooded shelters, landslides, clinic runs, and volunteer drain-clearing—as well as with children playing in the rain—this essay returns authorship to those living inside the image.

Finally, our poetry this summer, hailing from the Balkans—Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia—wryly toes the line between the soloist’s voice and the chorus’s. From Croatia, Danijel Dragojević (“Darkness,” “Freedom,” “Through the Opening on the Deck”) offers lucid, compact turns of mind; from Croatia, Tomica Bajsić (“Hymn to Killing,” “Rites of Spring”) sets witness beside renewal; from Montenegro, Dragana Tripković (“Spider Flags”) writes a public ode to the aftermath; from North Macedonia, Jovica Ivanovski (“With Your Hair Wet”) lets a refrain become a town’s memory; and from Croatia, Damir Šodan (“On the Train to Cascais”) makes a missed glance an ars poetica. Each, with its distinct music, holds a lyric moment open to the pressures of history.

Michael Shaikh’s interview, after bringing into focus decades of fieldwork through displacement, resource scarcity, and the food cultures erased by war, ultimately leads him back to a childhood scene in Larkana: a cousin cutting open a pomegranate, fear giving way to recognition as the seeds burst—“Alright, I cannot be scared of this fruit or this place anymore!” It is a moment in which the language of taste stands in for the language of experience: the sudden, wordless knowledge that the same thing which can estrange can also root you in place, and that one’s role within the whole is always just one shift away from opening a different register of civic standing.

Featuring, courtesy of the artists, original art by Elena Nikolic, Borna Bursac, Rene Grgic-Dakovic, Brigite Oury, Marcella Zanki, Zoran Simunovic, Tino Perdić, Nikola Golubovski, and Eileen Jimenez. Welcome to the July-August issue!

–Youmna M. Chamieh, Editor-in-chief

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“The German Teacher” – Amalia Ulman
In Amalia Ulman’s darkly comic story “The German Teacher,” a young woman, newly employed as a debt collector, is forced to confront her past when her first assignment leads her to a familiar figure from high school.

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“Clayton” – Stokley Towles
Ten thousand families came to a swap meet hall for boxes of food in San Antonio. A mindboggling figure in the face of what seems an insurmountable problem. But making a difference begins with words as simple as “Hello.” Stokley Towles’s heartwarming essay traces his journey to breaching the chasm to put a name to one of the many faceless unhoused persons in the neighbourhood, and how he learned to not look away.

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“Boca del Lobo” – Vanessa Micale
In this essay, Vanessa Micale grapples beautifully with grief, systemic and interpersonal violence, and the power of music as a redemptive collective force as she reflects on the surreality of the current political moment in the US, writing from the wreckage of domestic violence and harsh realities at the border.

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“Michael Shaikh: The Last Sweet Bite” – an interview by Raaza Jamshed
Michael Shaikh, author of The Last Sweet Bite, on how food is weaponized in conflict zones to starve bodies and cultures, as erasure becomes policy and preservation a form of resistance.

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“Weathering the Monsoons: Eid-ul-Adha in the Rohingya Camps” – a photo essay by Rohingyatographer
In Weathering the Monsoon, Rohingya photographers reclaim the frame, capturing the space where disaster meets defiance from inside the refugee camps.

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“Darkness,” “Freedom,” “Through the Opening on the Deck” – Danijel Dragojević
Three spare, reflective poems where a painter’s attic, a late-August wish to travel, and a ship’s engine glimpsed through a hatch become instruments for thinking about freedom’s brief flare. Translated from the Croatian by Damir Šodan.

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“Hymn to Killing,” “Rites of Spring” – Tomica Bajsić
A stark catalog of violence’s lures set against the everyday radiance of a park in spring: two registers that resist each other line by line. Translated from the Croatian by Damir Šodan.

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“Spider Flags” – Dragana Tripković
A civic lyric that walks from Tito-era spectacle to the present, stitching irony, desire, and fatigue into a single public address, exploring the stubborn afterlives of slogans. Translated from Montenegrin by Damir Šodan.

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“With Your Hair Wet” — Jovica Ivanovski

A refrain-driven monologue, familiar to many, that begins slyly as folk advice before widening into an affectionate portrait of habit, aging, and place. Translated from Macedonian by Damir Šodan.

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“On the Train to Cascais” — Damir Šodan
A poet on the move turns a missed glance into an ars poetica about desire, language, and what passes unsaid between stations—and words. Translated from the Croatian by James Meetze.