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.
The Shelf
Books as cultural lenses, not plot summaries
The Empire That Left No Ruins
Alev Scott goes looking for what the Ottomans left behind. What she finds is people, still carrying the arrangements.
The Iraq That Is Already Gone
Antoon's novel does not ask whether Iraq's Christians should stay or leave. It asks what it means to love a place that no longer exists.
Who May Love Whom
The God of Small Things* is not a caste novel. It is a taxonomy of permitted feeling — and what is left of people who loved beyond their allocation.
The Child the Gulf Refused
The Bamboo Stalk* is not about racism. It is about the architecture of belonging — and who designs it.
The City That Wasn't There
On *The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu*, the manuscripts Europe needed not to exist, and the myth that outlasted everyone who went looking.
Appetite Was Never Innocent
The Shelf — The Ghannouj Gazette
The salt cod on the Mary Rose in 1545 is not a curiosity. It is a supply chain. The fish was caught in Newfoundland, preserved in salt from the Atlantic coast, loaded onto a naval vessel, and consumed by men whose survival was the condition