She Does Not Run
Across six television productions on three continents, the same narrative structure recurs: a woman is handed a verdict. She declines it. What follows is construction.
Ghannouj
The Wall He Was Watching - The Shell by Mostafa Khalifa
Mostafa Khalifa spent thirteen years in Tadmor. The Wall He Was Watching doesn't dramatise that. It reports it — and the distinction is the entire argument.
The Last Time You Notice
A Paris steakhouse on its final lease, a Le Creuset orange that no longer exists, and the kind of attention that only shows up once. May We Suggest — five things worth noticing, once..
The Person Behind the Counter
The table near the door holds seven books. Not a hundred. Not a rotating display of whatever arrived on the lorry this week. Seven titles, faced out, each with a hand-lettered card that says something specific — not "moving," not "essential," but: the author spent four
The Woman Who Drew the Map
A review of Janet Wallach's Desert Queen — the biography of Gertrude Bell, the woman who helped draw the borders of modern Iraq and was ignored for understanding them too well.
The Weight of the Thing
The boutique was so small I almost walked past it. Something
caught — a window full of wrong combinations that were
somehow right, enamel, gold and stones arranged with the
confidence of people who had stopped asking for permission.
I went in.
Maya, Meena, and Zeenat Mukhi were all three inside,
To Cook Is to Refuse to Forget
A review of Stanley Tucci's Taste — on food as cultural memory, immigrant kitchens, and what illness reveals about why we eat.