And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world.

“What wounds you most,” writes Darwish, “is that ‘there’ is so close to ‘here.’

Righteous violence vented on some brutish, blighted lower caste has always been the key to entry into the fraternity of Western nations.

Mary didn’t teach civics or current events. She taught writing. Advanced Placement English, to be precise.

Haunt. You’ve heard me say this word a lot. It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt—to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, “Have you read this ye

The aim, Alon explained, was to create a “correlation between Jewish heritage and ownership” and to birth a generation who could not imagine anything other than complete Jewish rule over Eretz Israel.

Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it.

This want of a specific warrant to plunder specific humans is as old as “race” itself.

My loyalty to that lesson is dispositional—I am often struck by secondhand embarrassment watching writers defend themselves against every bad review. But it’s also strategic: My work is to set the table, craft the argument, render the world as I imagine it, and then go. The late Jamal Khashoggi was fond of the Arabic proverb “Say your word, then le