July 15, 2026 First Person A City Bigger Than a Bomb: Dispatch from Beirut By Jacob Russell Maaysra, Lebanon. The site of an Israeli air strike that destroyed a house and killed fifteen people in the small village of Maaysra, north of Beirut. Hezbollah installed a poster blaming the United States for the deaths. Photograph by Jacob Russell. In Lebanon the rains usually start around the end of October. There is little transition from summer. One day the weather is fine. The next great squalls come off the sea accompanied by thunder that shakes the walls. So we were cutting it close, planning our wedding for October 7. It was to be a garden wedding, and hostile skies would certainly spoil everything. That morning I woke up hazy from dinner the night before. The mountain air was a little brisk, but the sky seemed clear. I stood over the stove waiting for the rakweh to boil and letting the chill soothe my hangover. I checked my messages to see which guests might be lost on their way to the village, whether the caterers and DJ were going to be on time. The first was from a childhood friend who had traveled from London. “Should we be heading to the airport? A colleague’s telling me this is going to be really bad.” I asked him what had happened, and he suggested I check the news. Read More
July 14, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Zain Baweja on “Gloss” By Zain Baweja Scan of Zain Baweja’s notebook. In our series Making of a Poem, we ask poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Zain Baweja’s “Gloss,” which appears in our Summer issue, no. 256, plays with the etymological lineage and various translations of the word gul, or “rose,” across Urdu, Hindi, Persian, and English, among others. Our editorial intern James Langan, who pored over many archaic dictionaries to fact-check Baweja’s poem, spoke with him for this installment. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I don’t know when my fascination with the word gul began. I kept encountering novel uses of it in my readings of Urdu and Persian literature. In the Indo-Persian epic Dastan-e-amir hamza, for instance, there is a passage that uses the phrase gul khana (“to eat roses”) as the term for scarring oneself. It turns out, according to Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, that it was once a custom for lovers to burn themselves with a hot iron to prove their intense passion; it was also customary to treat “madness” with cauterization. A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English (1884) by John T. Platts. Scan of page 911, via Internet Archive. These archaic uses led me to bilingual dictionaries, like John Thompson Platts’s A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English and Francis Joseph Steingass’s A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary. In both texts, each entry is formatted as one dense and continuous paragraph. Multiscript headwords, definitions, idioms, and compound phrases are all crammed together into a single block of text, separated only by semicolons and em dashes. I felt a peculiar shock when reading these entries, which gather usages that traverse centuries and geographical regions and place them side by side. It is the sort of temporal compression found in a poem, and it attuned me to the mutability of words I thought I knew. I started collecting all the definitions of the word gul I could find. I wrote down entries from Platts and Steingass as well as colloquial uses from my own memory. My notes began to look like a glossary for some absent text. I decided to retain that indexical structure as a poetic form. Read More
July 10, 2026 On Sports The Hydration-Break World Cup By Jonathan Wilson A hydration break during Netherlands versus Tunisia at the 2026 World Cup. Photo by elisfkc3, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. It is axiomatic that countries hosting the World Cup try to put their best face forward. During the monthlong tournament, streets are cleared of anything (and anyone) that might offend the eye, political evils are swept under the rug, warm welcomes generally abound, and even authoritarian states, or those with notoriously disturbing human rights records, present themselves as sporting, full of bonhomie, and as cuddly as their official stuffed mascots. This time around, Mexico and Canada appear to have offered the standard warm embrace to teams and tourists alike; Mexico went so far as to provide a base for the Iranian team after the U.S. refused to allow its members to train, or even stay overnight, on American soil. In general, Trump’s government, which might claim it is simply eschewing hypocrisy, has been proud to display its ruthless, cruel, and ugly side, as if to declare, godlike, “We are what we are.” Hence, before the first whistle had been blown, Omar Artan, the FIFA-approved, award-winning Somali referee, was denied entry and deported, while Iraq’s star player and vice captain, Aymen Hussein, was held by border patrol at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and questioned for almost seven hours before being admitted. The Iraqi team’s photographer was not so lucky, nor were a number of Iranian officials and support staff, who were all given thumbs down for visas, along with untold thousands of fans from countries the U.S. doesn’t like. Despite the hostile intent suggested by their Viking helmets and imaginary longboats, no problems arose for the Norwegians. The question is always, Can the excitement of o jogo bonito transcend not only a host country’s xenophobic politics but also FIFA’s eternal greed and aura of corruption? How much can fans conveniently forget in order to enjoy the games? The answer, evidently, is a lot. A case in point: this year, for the first time, FIFA introduced compulsory hydration breaks at the midway point of each half. This seemed a reasonable response to the extreme heat forecast for some of the venues, and clearly good for the players’ health. However, more than a few games were scheduled in air-conditioned domes, or in locations with temperate climates. The hydration breaks quickly generated an animated fan response. Fox Sports, so the story went, had colluded with FIFA to generate more commercial revenue by turning football into a U.S.-style game with four quarters. “Fucking hydration breaks,” a fan yelled behind me on the way into the newly named New York New Jersey Stadium (it’s in New Jersey) to watch France play Senegal, then added, “Fattening the fucking capitalist wallet.” When the game began and the peerless Kylian Mbappé scored, he forgot all about wallets and I saw him fall into a kind of rapture. Meanwhile, the longest hydration break of all was taken by the Scottish fans in Boston, who may have drained the city of beer. Among its rewards for Scotland’s win, Boston became Glasgow’s sister city. It was surprising, given Boston’s fondness for the Celtic tradition, that no one had considered this before. Read More
July 9, 2026 On Books César Aira’s Art of Not Editing By Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer Photograph by Nina Subin. César Aira coined the term “the flight forward” (huirhacia adelante) to describe his deceptively simple writing process. Every morning he writes for one hour at a local Buenos Aires café and then in the evening he types up that morning’s work on his computer, and once that’s done, there is no editing or revision—no polishing, no going back to fix continuity errors in retrospect; there is none of the labor of “the writer’s craft.” About his morning routine, he explained in an interview why a noisy café is perfect for him: The coffee shop is the ideal environment to write because I can write there for an hour (it’s all I need to complete the day’s work) since I only have my Montblanc and my notebook with me, while at home I have books to read, music to listen to, movies to watch, my wife to chat with … In my house there is always something more important to do than write. They ask me how I can concentrate in a coffee shop full of noise and movement and with the spectacle of the street on the other side of the windows. It happens that to write, to write what I write, I need to de-concentrate. Concentration would lead me inexorably to the tedious subject matter of my own boring life. And, given the stipulation in the flight forward against revision, mistakes cannot be fixed but must be incorporated into the whole as the novel progresses, making an Aira book always surprising, even (or especially) to himself. The resulting pull of his fiction’s compulsive, ever-fresh flow along unusual narrative channels feels somehow at once both organic and precise. Perhaps it is Aira living so fully in the moment—catching his thoughts in midair as he writes his scenes—that makes life itself, in all its random strangeness, come so startlingly alive on his pages. And while Aira’s process relies on improvisation and incorporates chance events—a bird, for example, once flew into the café while he was writing, and he worked it into a story—the fruits of his technique fell far from haphazard. If Raymond Roussel’s feverishly detailed machines are a touchstone for Aira, so is the rigorous observation of Balzac’s Comédie humaine. Aira combines an innate genius for fiction with a humbling erudition—he’s read everything, and translated much of it, from Shakespeare to Stephen King—which is how he can, before our very eyes get away with his flights. Any process is, in theory, replicable, but applying Aira’s would end the career of most writers. Read More
July 8, 2026 On Painting Clearly Fake: Zurbarán’s Uncanny Realism By Jackson Arn Francisco de Zurbarán, Hercules and Cerberus, 1634, oil on canvas, 132 cm x 151 cm. © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado. The TikTok in question, posted by Donald Trump last summer, shows Barack Obama being wrestled to the floor, handcuffed, and held in a jail cell. The camera moves, or “moves,” too smoothly, and everything has a melted-plastic glow that screams AI-generated, at least for the time being. The first few bars of “Y.M.C.A.” are playing. So, yes: when the New York Times published an article about videos like this and deemed them clearly fake, it was stating what anybody with functioning eyeballs already knew. Then again, if the comment section is any guide, there appear to be sentient American adults who think the forty-fourth president is currently in prison. Lately I’ve wondered why people believe things, or if they really do. Often it appears they can’t remember whether they do or not. Nobody seems to know why this is the case, except that the internet is involved somehow, or MAGA, or wokeness, or AI. I had been thinking about the usual explanations, and getting tired of them, the same week I went to the National Gallery in London to look at the paintings of Francisco de Zurbarán. This turned out to be less of a digression than I’m making it sound. Read More
July 6, 2026 On Books Hélène Bessette and the Novel as Arc Lamp By Kathryn Scanlan The spark for Hélène Bessette’s third book came while she was on holiday with her two sons on the northern coast of France. One night, they heard a gunshot in the hotel where they were staying; Bessette later read in the newspaper that a boy had shot and killed his father. She continued to follow the case, and at some point began to reconstruct her findings on the page. A reader will quickly realize, however, that Bessette is not interested in anything like a straightforward true crime story; what burned in her were questions, and the book’s resulting form could be called an interrogation. Can we say she departed from the facts in the service of fiction, or should we say instead that fiction enabled a looser and truer vision of the crime? She published the book in 1955 as Vingt minutes de silence (newly translated as Twenty Minutes of Silence) with Éditions Gallimard, the home of her editor and champion, Raymond Queneau. It’s not surprising that Queneau admired Bessette’s novels, which resolutely ignore norms of grammar, typography, plot, character, and narrative, and look something like long, erratic dialogue-poems. In the introduction to the English version of his Exercises in Style, Queneau’s translator Barbara Wright describes the Oulipo cofounder’s interest in spoken French, citing a passage from his Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (1950): “I came to realize that modern written French must free itself from the conventions which still hem it in, (conventions of style, spelling and vocabulary) and then it will soar like a butterfly away from the silk cocoon spun by the grammarians of the 16th century and the poets of the 17th century.” Written language could be reformed by the spoken, and “the first statement of this new language should be … to put some philosophical dissertation into spoken French.” Twenty Minutes of Silence, though a novel, can also be read as a cacophonous speech-collage-turned-philosophical-investigation of crime and punishment, of social and familial mores, and of the genre of the novel itself. Read More