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Nabil Salih in The Boston Review:

Baghdad was cloaked in its familiar shroud of darkness when, in early October, I walked the al-Shuhada Bridge across the Tigris—more a ritual for me than a pastime. Long before Walter Benjamin described the Seine as “the vast and ever-watchful mirror of Paris,” the Andalusian traveler Ibn Jubayr saw the Tigris as “a mirror shining between two frames, or like a string of pearls between two breasts.” That image of splendor has long since dissipated. On the bridge that night, I passed by an old woman in her abaya sat begging on the curb; plastic waste lined the shallow waters below.

I was headed for al-Madrasah al-Mustansiriyah, a scholarly complex that was one of the few Abbasid landmarks to have survived the thirteenth-century Mongol destruction. Inside, an event called the “Arab Architecture Festival” was taking place, hosted “under the patronage” of Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani, as the organizers put it, to “[celebrate] Baghdad’s designation as the Arab Capital of Tourism for 2025.” Police pickups with machine guns mounted on top stood sentinel on both ends of the bridge. Security personnel manned the venue’s entrance, Kalashnikovs in hand. Wading into the labyrinthine, lifeless souqs beyond them was discouraged in the dark. After more than two decades since its “liberation” by U.S. forces, the city still felt like it was locked in a state of latent emergency.

More here.

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Michael Macher in Phenomenal World:

On September 30, hundreds of federal law enforcement officers raided a 130-unit apartment complex in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. After rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter, rifle-wielding agents hurled stun grenades, kicked down doors and dragged residents out of their apartments, zip-tying and detaining some of them for hours. The operation, ostensibly targeting an alleged stronghold of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, resulted in thirty-seven arrests of mostly Venezuelan immigrants. Dramatic footage was posted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on social media alongside the ominous caption: “To every criminal illegal alien: Darkness is no longer your alley. We will find you.” DHS later conceded that only two of those arrested actually belonged to any gang.

The South Shore raid is a microcosm of the new regime imposed by immigration hardliners at the DHS, the Justice Department, and the White House. Communities targeted by this enforcement blitz are familiar with its hallmarks, from indiscriminate force to the abandonment of due process, vacuous claims of criminality to theatrical violence. The fallout of such tactics is well-documented: a veteran attacked and dragged into a Portland ICE field office; Congressional Candidate Kat Abughazaleh thrown to the ground outside an immigration processing facility in Chicago; a Mexican national fatally shot while driving away from ICE agents; a 79-year-old man body-slammed by Border Patrol agents; NYC Comptroller Brad Lander and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka arrested by ICE agents under false pretenses. And now, the brutal killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, followed by the Trump administration’s attempts to smear her as a “domestic terrorist.”

ICE’s crackdowns and shock-and-awe operations are being carried out alongside more routine sweeps, in which facial recognition algorithms and the whims of street-level agents—rather than legal status, identification documents, or judicial process—increasingly decide who is detained and deported. With public opposition to the agency reaching fever pitch in many cities, it is worth pausing to ask whether this terrifying spectacle represents something genuinely new.

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Anton Cebalo in Noema:

For most of the 20th century, politics and even political parties were viewed as a home outside of home by many, fortified by strong social bases of support. Unions, churches, civic organizations and local community life made up the foundation. This rootedness created both manageable stability for the state and meaning for people.

These places of belonging have since declined, and so too has politics declined as a home. What has emerged in response is an untethered and distrusting public. Historically, transitional periods of great economic and social dislocation like ours are also times of heightened anti-political sentiments. Everyday people become detached from and even suspicious of their public representatives.

What makes today’s situation remarkable is how forcefully anti-political feelings have risen across many different countries, all at the same time. Recent polling shows dissatisfaction with democracy across 12 leading high-income nations at a median of 64% — a record high. These trends extend far beyond the Western world. 2025 has seen unprecedented revolts in Asia motivated by a strong sense of disgust toward politicians and nepotism. Similar anger has fueled protests in Kenya, Morocco, Madagascar and elsewhere across Africa.

Politicians and elites now find themselves “ruling the void,” in the words of political theorist Peter Mair.

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Anna Narinskaya in The Ideas Letter:

In 2024, the Russian medical student and activist Daria Kozyreva, now 20, was arrested in part for posting in the streets of Saint Petersburg verses by the nineteenth-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko that called for resisting the Russian Empire. In her final statement in court last April, just before receiving her verdict, Кozyreva said that she dreamed Ukraine would regain every inch of its land, including Crimea.

For the posters, she was sentenced to nearly three years in a penal colony—for those last words, she was sentenced to a substantial fine. Repression in Vladimir Putin’s Russia is endlessly perverse.

As of last year, the Russian authorities have been bringing charges—such as “discrediting the army” or “justifying terrorism”—against defendants in political trials for the statements they make before judges, including in their own defense.

The state seems to have understood that until then the glass box or the barred cage in which a defendant sits in Russian courts had been, paradoxically, one of the last places in the country where free speech was still possible.

Total censorship in the Soviet era did not allow defendants’ speeches to become publicly available. What did get out there from Stalin’s show trials were either subdued statements or forced confessions. In the 1970s, under Leonid Brezhnev and zastoy (the period of stagnation), secret transcripts were distributed by the underground press known as the samizdat. Repression under Putin today is both similar and different: It too is sweeping and self-serving, but it is taking place in a different context—politically and technologically.

When political trials first became common again in the 2010s, Russia still had a relatively free press. Proceedings were covered in detail, and defendants used their cage as a platform to speak the truth to a system that was persecuting them. Then, as censorship on traditional Russian news outlets increased, it was social media that took over relaying information about the trials.

But why was even that possible at all?

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Old Self

I chanced across my old self
today. He was sitting in the second
floor office where I used to work —
at the typewriter, young, thin guy,
dark tie, serious demeanor, writing
an essay against the Vietnam war.

I came up the stairs and saw him —
a decent human being, diligent,
not remotely aware of the ambush
life had waiting — not knowing
he’d permit himself to be taken
prisoner and then, in confusion,
do desperate things, betray
what he loved — and that nothing
would enable him to survive
as he was.

I passed the open door
and wanted to cry out — warn him,
force the warriors to raise
their spears. But even hearing
my shout, he would have only
hesitated. then turned back to
his devoted, lonely and interminable
work.

by Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook
Signal Books, Chapel Hill, NC,1997

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Sana Goyal in The Guardian:

“Love is not an easy thing … It’s both the disease and the medicine,” a character says in Manish Chauhan’s meditation on modern love. This poignant and perceptive coming-of-age story, about two strangers who become star-crossed lovers, is a powerful portrait of the lived realities of immigrants in Britain, and of love as home, hope and destiny.

Newly arrived in England following an arranged marriage with British-Indian Rajiv, Mira feels increasingly out of place as she finds out that Rajiv holds secrets and loves someone else. On the eponymous Belgrave Road in Leicester, entire days go by “without sight of an English person”, and Mira feels “disappointed that England wasn’t as foreign or as mysterious as she had hoped”. She takes English classes, finds companionship in her mother-in-law and fills her days with household chores, but nothing shifts her deep loneliness.

Tahliil is an asylum seeker from Somalia, who, together with his sister, Sumayya, joins their mother in Leicester. He works as an at-home carer and at a cash-and-carry for cash-in-hand while he waits for the Home Office to grant his request for asylum. With a chequered past and an uncertain future, he feels untethered to and untrusting of the world around him. That is, until he sees Mira, who has started working as a cook at the neighbouring sweet shop.

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Parul Sehgal in The New York Times:

Where are we exactly, in this deathless debate about the crisis of masculinity? We stand splattered in discourse, ears ringing from the unceasing alarm over men and their prospects — their lack of education and lack of friends, their porn and gambling, their suicide rates. This while tech elites, sporting their bulgy new bodies, call for an infusion of “masculine energy,” and a hideous new sport is born: “sperm racing.” Is it any wonder that a stance has emerged of principled contempt? The so-called crisis, according to its critics, is actually a crisis of accountability, a refusal on the part of men to regulate themselves emotionally and behave like adults. In this view, men aren’t in crisis, America is in crisis, and to suggest otherwise is to engage in a kind of “himpathy” — to show excessive concern for men’s feelings — and to co-sign a reactionary pushback.

Amid all this conversation, simultaneously so bloated and thin, an old book has been exhumed.

More here.

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Renée Nicole Macklin (her last name at that time) at Poets.org:

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs

i want back my rocking chairs,
solipsist sunsets,
& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of
cockroaches.

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores
(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—
the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the
dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs
inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

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Ben Brubaker at Quanta:

A growing body of research has found that different AI models can develop similar representations, even if they’re trained using different datasets or entirely different data types. What’s more, a few studies have suggested that those representations are growing more similar as models grow more capable. In a 2024 paper, four AI researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argued that these hints of convergence are no fluke. Their idea, dubbed the Platonic representation hypothesis, has inspired a lively debate among researchers and a slew of follow-up work.

More here.

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Oliver Traldi at The Point:

The emotional experience of direct and renewed acquaintance with the realities of selective pressure, such as the sudden introduction of sexual jealousy into a seemingly safe relationship, has had for me an almost mystical character, as though what’s reawakened is the prehistory of my whole species, which unwinds from its reptilian recesses, ornamented with the bizarre, gemlike contingencies of thousands of howling animal triumphs and the wailing ghosts of unmutated failures, splitting my consciousness as though from underneath, a whole ocean bursting forth from the sudden shift of tectonic plates; but this alarming thing that emerges, this dark uncoiling dragon capable of incomprehensible violence, seems also dimly recognizable as simply, in some sense, my own self.

It does not strike me as a coincidence that it is quite often the wild and dominating natural action of just these tidal forces which women seem to desire as consumers of the theater that is sometimes called kink. This provokes a feeling of being perceived, qua man, as though across a vast and ugly distance: radically unfamiliar and, as a happy result, perhaps competent in the contemporary eroticism exemplified by “romantasy”—romance books in which female leads liaise with creatures like giants, minotaurs, vampires and werewolves.

more here.

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Sam Kahn at Persuasion:

Let’s talk about a very 21st century scene. There’s an incident somewhere in the United States. The incident slots itself in neatly along the lines of preexisting ideological divisions. As the incident is unfolding, witnesses pull out their cell phone cameras to record it and those images are soon plastered across the web. Everybody sees essentially the same scene and everybody draws drastically different conclusions, depending on what their prior political convictions happen to be. And the result is a society split almost perfectly in two—disagreeing not only about underlying principles but even about which camera angles of an event, and which speed of playback, and which audio track, it prefers to focus on.

A textbook instance of this phenomenon occurred with the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis this week at the hands of ICE agents.

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Anahid Neressian in The Yale Review:

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From Undark Magazine:

During 2025’s New York Comic Con, Jim Lee — the president, publisher, and chief creative officer of DC Comics — spoke out against the use of artificial intelligence in the creation of the imprint’s comic books. “DC Comics will not support AI-generated storytelling or artwork. Not now. Not ever — as long as Anne DePies and I are in charge,” Lee said, punctuating his remarks with a concise observation: “AI doesn’t dream. It doesn’t feel. It doesn’t make art — it aggregates it.”

To many, Lee’s comments are worthy of praise — a leader of a revered institution taking a firm position against AI. Stands like his arise from AI’s negative impacts — especially those of generative AI — on actors, writers, and others in creative industries. Analogous concerns have arisen where health, justice, and education are concerned.

Many thoughtful voices in politics and culture are calling for controls on AI to protect the rights of those it impacts, be they artists, patients, renters, or defendants. Much of this has been captured in a modern movement labeled “AI Luddite.” Like the original Luddites of the 1800s, these AI Luddites are not so much anti-tech as pro-human. They demand that technology reinforce human creativity and the dignity of work, rather than replacing skilled workers with an unskilled precariat, or replacing them altogether with machines. They want technology to be a choice made by those who use it and those it affects, rather than being forced on them.

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Cat Lambert at Aeon Magazine:

In 1894, a German archaeologist named Herr G Heim made a groundbreaking discovery. On the island of Cyprus, he excavated a tomb that belonged to a hitherto unknown ancient female poet by the name of Bilitis. Carved on the walls surrounding her sarcophagus were more than 150 ancient Greek poems in which Bilitis recounted her life, from her childhood in Pamphylia in present-day Turkey to her adventures on the islands of Lesbos and Cyprus, where she would eventually come to rest. Heim diligently copied down this treasure trove of poems, which had not seen the light of day for more than two millennia. They would have remained little known – accessible only to a small, scholarly audience who could decipher ancient Greek – had a Frenchman named Pierre Louÿs not taken it upon himself to hunt down Heim’s Greek edition, hot off the press, and translated Bilitis’s poetry into French for a broader reading public that same year (published as Les Chansons de Bilitis or The Songs of Bilitis). Bilitis might have been an obscure historical figure – no other ancient author mentions encountering her or her poetry – but the cultural and literary significance of Heim’s discovery was not lost on Louÿs. For, in several of her poems, Bilitis revealed that she crossed paths with classical antiquity’s most renowned and controversial female poet: Sappho.

more here.

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