by Sauleha Kamal

With In the New Century: An Anthology of Pakistani Literature in English, Muneeza Shamsie, the time‑tested chronicler of Pakistani writing in English, presents what is arguably the definitive anthology in this genre. Across her collections, criticism, and commentary, Shamsie has chronicled, championed, and clarified the growth of a literary tradition that is vast but, in many ways, still nascent. If there is one single volume to read in order to grasp the breadth, complexity, and sheer inventiveness of Pakistani Anglophone writing, it would be this one.

Comprehensive and weighty in the best sense, In the New Century is a tome, and unapologetically so. It almost asks readers to peruse it at a leisurely pace, giving the vastness of its subject matter, picking up and sitting with one writer at a time to uncover new dimensions to this genre. Spanning the work published between 1997-2017 by over eighty writers with least one full-length published collection in that period, the book, a follow up to her first anthology A Dragonfly in the Sun: An Anthology of Pakistani Writing in English  (1997) proceeds in a loose chronological order according to the year of the author’s birth. This structure allows the reader to trace patterns across decades: the repetition of certain national traumas, the evolution of form and the confusing task of carving an identity. Each writer’s entry is prefaced by a concise biographical note which provides crucial context about their lives. This framing device is characteristic of Shamsie’s editorial approach: informed, unobtrusive, and generous. It also allows Shamsie to share priceless bits of trivia with readers, for example, that the Marxist writer Tariq Ali inspired Mick Jagger’s “Street Fighting Man.”

The first half of the anthology, in particular, feels like a trove of hidden gems, with stories, essays, and poems by a generation of writers who have shaped the tradition but are too often left out of mainstream discussions today. Only someone with Shamsie’s archival instinct and literary memory could have assembled such a list.

Recurring concerns of the Pakistani experience—displacement, migration, identity and  inequality—echo across time. Some older pieces that capture the resilience that defines Pakistan are uncanny in that they feel as if they could have been written in the contemporary moment. Zulfikar Ghose’s “Silent Birds” is one such poem, masterfully capturing the contradictions of life in Lahore going on as normal amid extreme incidents like terrorist attacks. Taufiq Rafat’s poem “Karachi ‘79” captures the paradox of a city built for chaos (“My relatives here/ have had to be evacuated/ by a naval boat./ When they planned this city/ they forgot the sewers”). The city’s stubborn survival set against the ongoing human consequences of a lack of urban planning still rings true. Abdullah Hussein’s “Émigré Journeys,” which recounts the story of a modest villager making up his mind to migrate to England motivated for the promise of “bright prospects,” strikes a sad chord amid today’s headlines of ICE raids in the US and Afghan refugee expulsions in Pakistan. Read more »

Bubble of a Guess and, Love Would Help

—on the Ukraine affair, Gaza, and lunatics

The saying is: there’s no time like the present
the truth is: there’s no time but the present
the rub is: what to do with the present?

There’s no reliable answer to that
it’s all conjecture
that’s what we’re stuck with, guesses,
some more educated than others
but guesses nonetheless, our
existential condition

When we painted ourselves into an atomic corner
we upped the ante by megatons—
regardless, whatever we decide will be
determined by the bubble of a guess,
or a wish and a prayer
………..—Dominus vobiscum, big time,
and the absence of lunatics,
not to mention that, in any case,
love would help while hate
will bite to the bitter end; but
that’s already been covered here
in the line about lunatics

Jim Culleny, 3/13/22– / 08/16/25

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by Jeroen Bouterse

 Under Nanna’s moon – a girl under Nanna’s moon, alone I lie

 Under Nanna’s moon drifting over the pure mountains alone I lie,

 Under the mountains of the cedars where sleeps Mullil alone I lie.[1]

“It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon”, writes Omar El Akkad in 2025. He can’t, because “no description of the moon […] reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it.” Bertold Brecht wrote in the 1930s that in his time, talking about trees was almost a crime, because it implied silence about so many wrongs.

Brecht’s words are addressed To those born after, those who “will emerge from the flood that engulfed us”. They are asked to judge mildly: “when you speak of our weaknesses, remember too the dark time from which you escaped.” El Akkad’s book is titled One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. For him, the passing of time will allow us to settle down in comfortable and hypocritical narratives about our own innocence, and teach us nothing.

The lines above are an attempt to escape into a time where caring about the moon and talking about trees were possible. The millennia-old poetry produced by the early cities of ancient Mesopotamia seems out of reach of modernity and its missiles. We can rest our eyes on a divinity dedicating a riverbank to his mother:

 May its meadows grow herbs for you,

 may its ledges grow grapevines and (yield) grape sirop for you,

 may its slopes grow cedar, cypress, supalu-trees and box for you,

 may it adorn itself for you with tree fruit like an orchard.[2]

The distant past was not innocent; people died young there, from disease, violence, and hunger – there is Sumerian verse mentioning starvation threats as an instrument of war.[3] Even between these generic but optimistic lines of blessing – a demon that terrified the high gods themselves has just been vanquished; the future looks bright – it is not difficult to read helplessness and terror. We have to hope that meadows grow their herbs and slopes grow their cedar trees; the alternative is awful to imagine. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

Among the many things America is wrestling with right now is what constitutes a level playing field? What are the elements of a society where everyone has opportunity? There are certainly multiple competing answers to these questions.

Like America, Singapore is multicultural and, in their view, multi-racial – although I would call it multi-ethnic. The main three ethnicities for Singaporean nationals are Chinese (of many sub-groups such as Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka, Cantonese, etc…), Malay and Tamil Indian followed by a longtail of very small minorities who get less focus like Sephardic Jews, Bugis and Peranakans.

Power and respect between the ethnicities was one of Singapore’s earliest challenges. In fact, Singapore wouldn’t be an independent country if not for it. Initially, Singapore was one state of the Malaysian Federation – which was as a whole expected to gain its independence from Great Britain in 1965. Only cultural and linguistic issues began to sour conversations within the new government. Looking at the Malaysian Federation as a whole, Malays were the dominant ethnicity and began to strongly insist on additional rights and privileges as the Bumiputeras – Sons of the Soil.

This was problematic for Singapore with a more than 70 percent Chinese ethnic population. Singaporean leadership was fine with Malay as the official language of what would become Malaysia, but felt that all citizens deserved equal rights and privileges. In short, the country should be an equal playing field for all.

This sticking point led the Malaysian Federation to expel Singapore within a month of Malaysia’s expected independence. Many felt it was a gambit to scare Singaporean leadership into submission. But to everyone’s surprise, including the Singaporean leadership itself, Singapore did not go crawling back to Malaysia, deciding instead to go it alone. Read more »

by Charles Siegel

In the first part of this column last month, I set out the ways in which the separation of powers among the three branches of American government is rapidly being eroded. The legislative branch isn’t playing its part in the system of “checks and balances;” it isn’t interested in checking Trump at all. Instead it publicly cheers him on. A feckless Republican Congress has essentially surrendered its authority to the executive.

Having sidelined Congress entirely, Trump has trained his fire on the other supposedly coequal branch of government. The executive branch is engaged in a sustained, multipronged war against the judicial branch. This war is waged every day across the country, inside courtrooms from coast to coast, and outside courtrooms as well.

Inside the courtroom, Trump’s Department of Justice is seemingly trying to create its own reality – a new kind of reality divorced from both facts and law. It is important to understand here that the DOJ, whose lawyers represent the United States in court every day in hundreds of federal courthouses, is not, despite its name, part of the judicial branch. It is, rather, part of the executive branch.

For most of the nation’s history, however, the DOJ has viewed itself as an independent agency, dedicated to pursuing justice – not to advocating for the personal interests of the executive. Its federal law enforcement power was largely wielded independently of Congress or the president. It hasn’t always been this way – Watergate was a particularly egregious example of DOJ being used by a president for his own corrupt purposes. But after Watergate, bipartisan efforts to insulate DOJ from politics ensued, and these were mostly successful. These efforts involved statutory enactments, such as elements of the Ethics in Government Act and the Federal Election Campaign Act. But equally importantly, they also involved a strong commitment to the same basic understanding of DOJ’s role, by presidents of both parties and their appointees. Even in Trump’s first term, his two attorney generals, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, both of whom were stout conservatives, ultimately refused to let DOJ surrender to Trump’s commands.

This understanding that has prevailed for the last 50 years has been shredded in six months. Read more »

I tried to photograph the graceful flight of this heron but it landed on this seemingly dead tree branch next to the river Eisack in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, before I could capture it flying.

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by Akim Reinhardt

I drive in silence these days. That in itself is nothing new. For years, my solo road trips across America have featured long stretches of near silence. Nothing coming from the speakers. No talk, no music, no pleading commercials. Just the whir of the road helping to clear my mind.

But not at home.

Tooling around Baltimore, whether commuting about twenty minutes each way or running some errands, I almost always have the radio on. Or at least I did. That started to change in January and February, though the issue dates back to last November.

Donald Trump’s victory was not much of a surprise, but deeply depressing nonetheless. And it was the first time an election depressed me. There’s been no shortage of shitty politicians I’ve hated to see win elections in the past. But this felt different. Maybe because I’m a little older now and my perspective is changing. Maybe because it was so obvious there would be very few guard rails the second time around. Maybe because Trump really is a psychopathic rapist and aspiring dictator who has successfully chipped away at democratic norms while transforming the U.S. presidency into shameless kleptocracy while about a third of the electorate ardently roots him on. Whatever the reason, it was very clear to me that a new, very fucked up version of “normal” was about to unfold, and the one thing I could not stomach was reputable news agencies, dizzy with fear, doing everything they could to sound “objective,” which meant actively sticking their heads the sand and pretending that everything was still the old, familiar normal.

At the opening of Trump’s second term, that was NPR to the max, for all the good it did them; it took Trumpists all of half a year to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As if you couldn’t see it all coming. I certainly did, and I absolutely could not bear to listen to them normalize the pending Trumpist assault on the U.S. republic. But I didn’t switch the station. Instead, I did something that, as a former radio DJ myself at two different public stations, surprised me. I turned the radio off. Which is a shame, because it meant I was forsaking Baltimore’s fairly robust radio scene. Read more »

by Angela Starita

Over the past six years, I’ve intermittently studied weaving. For reasons unknown to me, I’ve wanted to weave for at least the last 20 years, but only as a distant dream. It was part of a larger fantasy, one I wrote an essay about years ago: riding a bike to a clean studio reminiscent of a kindergarten classroom, lots of light, plywood furniture and reams of color in the form of signage and yarn and material. I’d go there every day, work on a project and other women would be working on their projects–parallel experiences but no collaboration. There would be long periods of quiet as we concentrated with occasional meal breaks. By 3 or 4, we might start talking, playing music, showing off our progress. Then we’d clean up our spaces and bike back home. This was how we’d make our living. The specifics of our funding sources remained unresolved —it was a daydream, and I had enough trouble figuring out money flow in real life.

The essay, though, was really about my ambivalence towards fiber art, something I didn’t sense in the younger women who were taking up knitting and crocheting and sewing with what I deemed nary a moment of critical reflection about the historic role of those skills in women’s lives. In articles at the time, needle arts were seen as part of a DIY trend, a resurrection of skills learned from grandmothers and with a fair amount of attendant nostalgia. Both my grandmothers were talented at knitting and sewing, and in fact, I learned the basics of crochet from one of them. The other was in a deep senility by the time I was born, but I learned that she’d been hesitant to teach those skills to her three daughters. Her mantra was go to college and get a good job so you stay in a marriage because you want to, not because you have to.

Though I think her own marriage was a strong one, my grandfather’s insolvency in the middle of the Depression meant she needed to go back to freelance garment work. She’d spend whole nights bent over a crochet beading loom, prepping beads that she’d sew onto evening gowns for a designer she called Miss Ania. Those weren’t skills she wanted her girls to depend on. Read more »

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by Rafaël Newman

Language changes. And I’m fine with that, particularly since it wouldn’t make any difference if I weren’t. I have made my peace with the attrition of the oblique case of the interrogative pronoun—“Who to follow”¹ instead of whom; with the replacement of the subjunctive by the indicative in result clauses—“Yet the exorbitant must be rendered exemplary or typical in order that her life provides a window onto the lives of the enslaved in general,”² rather than provide, to express a hoped-for outcome; with the transformation of i-a-u ablauts (ring-rang-rung, sink-sank-sunk) into semi-deponent verbs—“For the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very profound,”³ where the past participle is used instead of sank, the simple past; by the extension of the subjective “suspicious” to cover the objective “suspect”—a suspicious person is now not so much the one who harbors a suspicion of foul play, as the one who is suspected of it (no examples needed here; simply round up the usual suspects).

I can intuit the unconscious force behind such deformations, all of which perform the characteristic work of linguistic development: which is to simplify by removing or replacing forms no longer required for disambiguation, or whose vestigial inflection remains stranded after the tide has borne out most of their company (as in the case of whom, in the mostly no longer inflected idiom of modern English).

What I cannot bring myself to accept, however, whether in common speech or in (astonishingly) unedited written accounts, is the creeping use of the nominative “I” in compound objects (“Susan and I”), both direct and indirect, where the oblique “me” (that is, the accusative or dative form of the word) would be reflexively supplied were the object used by the speaker in uncompounded form. Read more »

Junya Ishigami. Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 2019.

Photograph by Sughra Raza, August 14, 2019.

“Ishigami’s design takes inspiration from roofs, the most common architectural feature used around the world. The design of the 2019 Serpentine Pavilion is made by arranging slates to create a single canopy roof that appears to emerge from the ground of the surrounding Park. Within, the interior of the Pavilion is an enclosed cave-like space, a refuge for contemplation. For Ishigami, the Pavilion articulates his ‘free space’ philosophy in which he seeks harmony between man-made structures and those that already exist in nature.

Describing his design, Ishigami said: ‘My design for the Pavilion plays with our perspectives of the built environment against the backdrop of a natural landscape, emphasising a natural and organic feel as though it had grown out of the lawn, resembling a hill made out of rocks. This is an attempt to supplement traditional architecture with modern methodologies and concepts, to create in this place an expanse of scenery like never seen before. Possessing the weighty presence of slate roofs seen around the world, and simultaneously appearing so light it could blow away in the breeze, the cluster of scattered rock levitates, like a billowing piece of fabric.’”

More here and  here.

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by William Benzon

Sometime in 1984, after Apple had released the first Macintosh, my friend Rich sent me a short note he’d written on one. The note had some text, not much, nor do I remember about what, and a black and white image of Japanese woman that Apple had put on the over of the user guide for the Mac. I took one look and thought, “text and images together on a page from the same computer, I gotta’ have one.” So I took out a loan for $4,000 ($12,000 in current dollars for the Mac, disk drive, and printer) and bought one. I wrote text, made images, and above all, put them on the same page using the same program.

I ended up writing an article for Byte Magazine, one of the premier magazines for home computers back then, “The Visual Mind and the Macintosh.”

In my opinion, the Apple Macintosh is the most significant microcomputer since that original MITS kit. but its importance hasn’t been adequately explained. The Mac is user friendly, but even more important is what lies beyond that user-friendly interface–MacPaint. […] By making it easy for us to create images and work with them, the Macintosh can help us to think. Perhaps our society will create a pool of images for thinking comparable to our pool of proverbs and stories.

A year or so later one Michael Green published an astonishing book, Zen and the Art of Macintosh. Green used a Macintosh to place text and images together on each page, seamlessly, wonderfully. I began daydreaming about a publishing renaissance, page after page where text and image worked together in new and wonderful ways.

Alas, it didn’t happen. Retrospectively it’s obvious why. Who’s going to create such books? Relatively few people are highly skilled in the production of both text and images. Green is exceptional.

On December 6, 2024 I published the first of many posts in which I asked Claude to describe a photograph I taken of a Burger King outside the Holland Tunnel at night. When I asked, “What artist painted pictures like this?” it got the answer I was fishing for: Edward Hopper. That’s been an interesting series of posts, though I have don’t one since the end of April.

At roughly that same time, April 24, I did a post where I had ChatGPT create variations on an image that I uploaded. That’s the first post where I used an image created by ChatGPT. I’ve done many such posts since then, and created many images with ChatGPT that I’ve not posted. In many cases, perhaps the majority at this point, I gave it a photograph as the basis for an image. In some cases I asked it to modify the image in a simple way (see the coffee cup below) while in other cases I asked it use that image as the basis for a new one. In a few cases I’ve had it create an image on the basis of a verbal prompts, sometimes simple, sometimes complex.

In the rest of this post I give you a small handful of examples. As is often the case with my posts, it’s a bit wordy, so you might pour yourself a gin and tonic or a cup of tea. Or you might decide, “It’s got pictures! To hell with the words!” Let’s dive in. Read more »

by Ken MacVey

By many measures wealth inequality in the US and globally has increased significantly over the last several decades. The number of billionaires has increased at a staggering rate. Since 1987, Forbes has systematically verified and counted the global number of billionaires. In 1987, Forbes counted 140. Two decades later Forbes  tallied a little over 1000. It counted 2000 billionaires in 2017. In 2024 it counted 2,781, and in March this year it counted 3,028 billionaires (a 50% increase in the number of billionaires since 2017 and almost a 9% increase since 2024).

Wealth concentration has increased in the US in the last few decades as well according to the Federal Reserve.  It reported that the wealthiest  .1 percent (the top fraction of one percent)  has increased its share of national wealth from 8.67 % in 1989  to 14% in 2024.  The top one percent’s share has increased altogether, now accounting for 31% of US wealth.   At the same time, the bottom 50% accounted for only 3.5% of US wealth in 1989,and in 2024 that percent is down to 2.5%.

Thinktank Oxfam estimated in 2024  that the wealthiest one percent of the globe has as much wealth as 95 percent of humanity. It also predicts that in the next decade there will be five trillionaires.

To put this in personal context, if you had a million dollars and  spent one thousand dollars a day (and assuming no interest or other return on your million), you would use up the million in a little more than two and a half years. If you had a billion, at a thousand a day, you would use that up in about 2,700 years.  If you  had a trillion, you would use it up in about 2,700,000 years.  This is the result of the simple fact that a billion is a thousand times greater than one million, and a trillion is one thousand times greater than a billion. Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

The first time many of us learn the word “no,” it’s not in the context of refusal—it’s in discipline. A toddler reaches for the stovetop: “No.” She throws a block: “No.” In these earliest exchanges, no is a limit set by someone else, a redirection of will. It’s a stop sign held by authority. Children learn it as a small jolt, a micro-disruption in their experiment with the world.

And yet, the day comes when that same word becomes ours to wield. We learn—slowly, awkwardly—that no can be a boundary, not just an order. That it can protect us, define us, even save us. But by then, the baggage has already attached itself. We’ve been trained to think of no as negative, obstructive, and, in many cases, socially costly.

This is the paradox at the heart of no: linguistically, it is a word of negation; psychologically, it is an act of self-definition. It shuts a door, but in doing so, it opens a space—often the first space where personal agency can breathe.

The English no comes to us from Old English nā, a compound of ne (“not”) and ā (“ever”). In its oldest form, it was absolute: not ever. No qualification, no wiggle room. Cognates in other languages—non in French, nein in German—carry the same bluntness.  Japanese, for instance, often avoids direct negation by substituting more face-saving constructions like chotto… (“it’s a bit…”) instead of a flat iie (“no”).

Across languages, direct negation can be perceived as impolite. In many cultures, to say no outright is to disrupt harmony. Anthropologists studying high-context communication (common in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East) have noted that refusals are often couched in narrative, delay, or metaphor. The word no is there in spirit, but rarely in its bare form.

In English-speaking cultures, we don’t always avoid the word—but we soften it. I don’t think so. Maybe later. I’m not sure that works for me. This linguistic hedging reflects the social weight we’ve given no—especially when spoken by women or anyone in a subordinate position. A plain refusal risks being read as hostile. And so we learn to dress it in apologies, in smiles, in disclaimers. Read more »