Nadja Pass on how curiosity, connection, and collective imagination can help renew the foundations of a peaceful society.
There is a whale somewhere in the deep ocean that has become a world.
Credit: Concopia Cards
When a whale dies, its body sinks to the ocean floor and becomes an ecosystem. Creatures arrive to feed, new organisms take hold, and life flourishes in a place that might otherwise have been empty. Scientists call this a whale fall.
For Nadja Pass, a Danish civic designer and the creator of Concopia Cards, it is also a metaphor for what we owe one another—and what we might leave behind.
Credit: Concopia Cards
“Whale Fall” is one of her favorite cards in the Concopia deck, a set of cards Pass designed to help spark conversations. It asks us to consider what we want to pass on: What have we learned that future generations might build upon? What can we contribute that will continue to nourish life after we are gone?
These questions invite us to think beyond individual achievement, and toward something more enduring: the conditions that allow other people, communities, and future generations to flourish. It is also a useful place to begin thinking about regenerative civics.
Democracy must do more than reproduce its existing institutions. It must continually renew the relationships, shared knowledge, imagination, and capacity for collective action that make self-government possible.
For Pass, this work began with a moment of disappointment.
When voting isn't enough
In 2009, Pass was standing in line to vote in Denmark, frustrated by the choices on the ballot. She wanted to participate in democracy, but didn't feel that any of the available options represented what she wanted for society.
Then, a question occurred to her: Why wasn't she a better citizen herself?
She believed citizenship mattered. She wanted to contribute more. Yet when she looked at her own life, she realized that the conventional pathways for civic participation did not fit her personality. She felt embarrassed and alone, as though she had somehow fallen through the civic system. Rather than finding another way in, she had drifted away from participation altogether.
After the election, she began talking openly about her experience, and discovered that other people felt the same. What had felt like a private failure turned out to be a shared problem: People wanted to contribute to society, but couldn't find forms of participation that felt meaningful to them.
That realization became the beginning of Civic Desire, a civic laboratory she developed with collaborator Andreas Lloyd. Using their own experiences as a starting point, they began experimenting with different ways of participating, then documenting and sharing what worked, what didn't, and why.
Pass has observed a similar pattern in other civic initiatives. Someone begins with a question. They investigate it, give it a shape, and share it with others. Eventually, what began as personal curiosity becomes a collective endeavor.
She describes this transformation with a playful phrase that she learned from Lars AP, another Danish civic designer: when individual star gazing becomes collective star gazing.
The task is not simply to persuade people to enter existing democratic institutions. It is to make room for more ways of contributing.
Re-enchanting the civic imagination
Concopia grew out of that impulse. Pass describes it as “a collection of curiosities and questions that encourage us to reimagine and re-enchant the world.” Its questions invite people to look at familiar things from unfamiliar angles, examine their assumptions, and explore what they might otherwise leave unspoken.
The cards are not a conventional civics curriculum. They don't begin with the structure of government or ask participants to debate a prescribed set of policies. Instead, they create openings for discovery: about how we live, what we value, what we are losing, and what we might build together.
Pass developed the first iteration of the cards during the COVID-19 pandemic. While public conversation often centered on immediate disagreements about masks and vaccines, she wondered whether the crisis might offer a larger opportunity. Democracy works better when people are willing to listen openly and respect the opinions of others, even when those opinions are difficult to hear. When everyday routines are disrupted, why not use the moment to rethink how we live and what we want to change?
It was a chance for a civic renaissance.
She wanted people to have the conversations that might otherwise never happen. Even more, to prompt a starting point for individuals to find and connect with kindred spirits and create projects together.
That ambition is especially relevant to democracy today. Institutions can provide formal opportunities to participate, but they cannot manufacture the curiosity, mutual recognition, or willingness to listen that meaningful participation requires. Those capacities must be cultivated, and Concopia creates room for people to practice.
When an ally becomes a source of fear
For Denmark, the American threats to take control of Greenland have brought an unsettling realization: Even a longstanding democratic friend can become a source of profound insecurity.
Greenland is a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, and the American president's threats to acquire it shocked a country accustomed to decades of peaceful relations with the United States. It also raised questions that many Danes had scarcely imagined confronting. What happens when a powerful ally threatens the sovereignty of a smaller country? What does solidarity look like when the threat comes from within an alliance built on mutual security? And how do people respond when the rules they have trusted suddenly seem less certain?
While allies, the much bigger United States was acting like a bully. Pass describes feeling a deep sense of vulnerability in light of this shocking encounter with power, which seemed to leave little room for resistance. The experience was both geopolitical and personal.
Yet Pass also saw something hopeful in her country’s response. The crisis brought people together around a shared sense of what was at stake. It became a wake-up call: a reminder that peace cannot be taken for granted and that societies accustomed to stability must better prepare for a future marked by greater volatility.
For Pass, this has meant creating spaces where people can find and listen to each other, ask better questions, and imagine ways of living together that do not depend on domination.
This may sound gentle, but it is far from a passive response in the face of coercive power.
Authoritarian behavior often works by making people feel isolated, powerless, or unable to imagine alternatives. Pass's work helps cultivate some of the capacities that democratic resilience requires: independent thought, mutual recognition, curiosity about difference, and the confidence to question whether the existing order is the only possible one.
A card deck cannot replace political action, institutional safeguards, or collective organizing. But those efforts become more possible when people retain the ability to think for themselves. The democratic imagination itself is also something worth defending.
The banality of virtue
During our conversation, Pass and I discuss Denmark's collective memory of Nazi occupation. In 1943, thousands of Danish Jews escaped to neutral Sweden with help of organized rescue efforts, often at considerable personal risk to the people behind the organizing. Pass says these stories remain an important source of inspiration for thinking about how communities should respond when members are threatened.
I share a phrase from my graduate school mentor, the social psychologist Lee Ross: the banality of virtue. While Hannah Arendt has made the banality of evil a familiar framework for thinking about how ordinary people can become complicit in extraordinary wrongdoing, Ross was interested in the opposite: that people might also do the right thing without necessarily seeing themselves as heroes.
Pass immediately connects with the idea. During a recent conversation with students about weighing risks, she shares that a participant reflected on the times he had made the wrong decision when faced with a difficult choice. This led to a question he had not previously considered: What would it mean to accept risk because doing the right thing matters?
The lesson is not that courage comes easily or that everyone can take the same risks. People have different responsibilities, resources, and vulnerabilities. It is that a society's capacity to respond to danger depends, in part, on whether ordinary people have opportunities to think together about responsibility—before a crisis arrives.
It is here that peacebuilding and democracy meet.
A library becomes a chamber of wonders
For Pass, the journey from a Danish civic laboratory to Washington, DC, was an exercise in the kind of serendipity her Concopia cards hope to encourage.
In 2023, Pass attended the Next Library biennale, an international gathering of library professionals and public engagement practitioners held in Aarhus, Denmark. While there, she struck up a conversation with an American participant. The next morning, the two ran into each other at a coffee shop, and continued talking, discovering a shared enthusiasm for the possibilities of libraries as places of public connection.
Her new acquaintance was Meaghan O’Connor, Director of Service Design & Engagement at Washington's Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. While neither knew it yet, O’Connor would eventually help Pass bring her project to the United States. One of the conference's keynote speakers had received a Concopia deck and shown it to the library director, who ordered one for herself.
A few messages later, the invitation came: What dates could Pass come to Washington?
The result was the Concopian Chamber of Wonders, an exhibition at the MLK Library that transforms the cards from a tabletop conversation into an experience visitors can move through physically. The project has since also opened doors to other libraries and communities, including a Concopia salon at New York’s The Library Field, a developing project by the Metropolitan New York Library Council that imagines nature itself as a library.
Libraries, Pass believes, are becoming important strongholds of democracy. Their networks are collaborative rather than competitive; one institution can help another experiment, learn, and bring new ideas to its community. More than just a venue, the library is also an important example of civic infrastructure—a place where people can encounter new ideas and people, and practice being part of a shared world.
At a time when public life can be shaped by fear, polarization, and the threat of force, this kind of infrastructure matters. It creates spaces where people can meet outside the immediate demands of political conflict, exercise their curiosity, and discover that they have more possibilities than they may have imagined—making it the perfect home for Pass’s work.
Regeneration means passing something on
Pass is independent by choice. She values the ability to work without compromising her ideas, and she has organized her life around purpose rather than maximizing income. That freedom has allowed her to experiment, take risks, and devote time to the common good.
She believes her generation has a particular responsibility: People who grew up in an analog world and then helped shape the internet should serve as bridges between different generations and experiences of that world.
Pass has explored these questions in short books, and in conversations with young relatives. One book contrasts the way things used to be with the way they are now, using simple images to prompt discussion. It is not meant to be an argument against change, but rather, an invitation to notice it, contextualize it, and decide what’s worth preserving.
That is another form of regeneration: not a return to the past, but a conscious carrying forward of what remains valuable while making room for what comes next.
The "Whale Fall" card brings these threads together. Its question is not simply what legacy we want to leave, but how we can leave something that others can use, transform, and build upon.
For democracy, that might mean passing on more than institutions and laws. It might mean preserving community knowledge, creating public spaces for difficult conversations, and teaching people how to listen across differences. It might mean building civic practices that can survive beyond their founders, so that each generation does not have to begin again from scratch.
This is where peacebuilding and democracy become inseparable. Peace is not only the absence of violence, and democracy is more than the act of voting. Both depend on a society's ability to renew the conditions for living together: the relationships, knowledge, habits, and institutions that help people face uncertainty without surrendering their capacity to act collectively.
Nadja Pass did not set out to become a civic leader. She began as a voter who felt that something was missing. Rather than conclude that the problem was hers alone, she chose to share it. From there, a civic laboratory emerged, then a deck of cards, then an exhibition, then a growing network of libraries and communities.
Because she is not a political analyst or strategist, her story offers a different picture of civic courage. It is not always loud, confrontational, or immediately legible as political action. Sometimes it looks like making room for a conversation that would not otherwise happen. It is affirming people with a desire for change that they are not alone. Sometimes it means creating something beautiful that helps people recover their sense of agency. Sometimes it is insisting that even in a frightening moment, we have the capacity to think, choose, and build together.
The answer to authoritarian behavior cannot be optimism alone. It requires institutions, organization, accountability, and people willing to stand with one another. But those efforts become more possible when people can imagine a future beyond the immediate exercise of power—and when they have practiced the habits of solidarity that make collective action possible.
The whale falls to the ocean floor, and a new world takes shape around it.
What if our civic lives could work that way, too? What if we built institutions and relationships that nourish people we may never meet, preserve what we have learned, and make it easier for future generations to resist coercion and care for one another?
In an unsettled world, that is not an escape from politics. It is part of the work of democracy—and of peace.
[post_title] => The Art of Regenerative Civics
[post_excerpt] => Nadja Pass on how curiosity, connection, and collective imagination can help renew the foundations of a peaceful society.
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Could a USB-sized vagina model unlock women's healthcare?
There is a big problem in the world of women’s healthcare: It is under-researched and underfunded, receiving around only 5% of global funding. As a result, the male body has become the default, often at the expense of women, who experience conditions differently from men and have a whole range of specific healthcare needs.
At Harvard University’s Wyss Institute, with Gates Foundation help, a team of scientists have been looking to fix this disparity, and to create a better model for women’s health research—using small, clear USB drive-sized devices, each “containing” a vagina and a cervix.
Organs-on-a-chip might sound like something dreamed up in a sci-fi movie, but it’s a development already having a real impact in the here and now. A fairly new technology, the first, a lung-on-a-chip, was created in 2010, also at the Wyss Institute. The chips are made of clear polymer with hollow channels, which are lined with living human cells, each replicating a human organ. They can be used for things like drug and toxicity testing, or disease modelling, and are now finally being used to tackle a range of women’s health conditions.
There is growing confidence in new models like these, including hope in some parts of the scientific community that organ-on-a-chip technology could replace animal testing models, which aren’t just unethical, but often irrelevant for human biology. (Earlier this year, the team at Wyss also won the science category of the Lush Prize, which aims to support efforts to replace animal testing.) There’s also hope that one day scientists will be able to create a full body-on-a-chip, where the various organ chips are connected together to model the whole system.
Dr. Anna Stejskalová, a postdoctoral researcher on the Wyss project who has now moved to Imperial College London, believes the technology could lead to huge advances in women’s healthcare.
“Many women suffer from this condition called bacterial vaginosis,” Stejskalová cites as one example, an overgrowth of a non-optimal microbiome (a community of microorganisms), which around 30% of women develop each year. This imbalance of bacteria can cause unusual discharge and an increased risk of infertility or pregnancy complications.
There’s a big effort, she explains, to create probiotics which could flip the microbiome into a healthy state, something the vagina-on-a-chip and cervix-on-a-chip might help scientists figure out before doing any human clinical trials. The chips have also been used to study how effective and safe it is for women to use a new type of non-hormonal contraceptive that targets sperm.
In her research group at Imperial College London, Stejskalová will be using various organ chips to address other health conditions, including pregnancy complications and endometriosis. Previously, while at the Wyss Institute, she and her team also developed the endocervix chip for evaluating preterm labor, one of the leading causes of death in children under five years old.
“Currently we have no way to stop preterm labor from happening, or even of guessing who will deliver preterm,” she says, explaining that the only routine indicator is a premature shortening of the cervix visible on an ultrasound during the second trimester.
The Wyss team was able to reproduce parts of this scenario on the chip, mimicking the shortening, and screening potential treatments. This is something which could never be tested on a pregnant woman, as the risk to the pregnancy would be much too high. Though they only have preliminary results, Wyss researchers are already starting to develop methods that can lead towards new therapeutic strategies.
Stejskalová also helped develop the fallopian tube chip—currently being used in contraceptive testing—and other organs-on-chips alongside key members of the Wyss team, including Dr. Zohreh Izadifar. Collectively, these chips are the closest living laboratory models to human vaginal and cervical tissues available today.
“The vagina and cervix chips have the potential to make a major impact on women’s health because they address a long-standing gap in biomedical research,” Izadifar says. “For decades, many conditions that disproportionately affect women have been understudied, and that has limited our understanding of disease mechanisms and slowed the development of better treatments.”
In the long term, the use of this technology could help shift women’s healthcare from symptom management alone towards more precise, effective, and preventive treatments for millions of patients worldwide, Izadifar adds.
The chips created at the Wyss Institute are commercially available to other researchers, and organ chips are already being used by the pharmaceutical industry to evaluate different drugs. Some chips are healthy generic models, which could be used to test for things like the toxicity of products. Other chips are disease-specific, like for bacterial vaginosis. (There is a push to standardize organ chips which have a specific use that “really mimic this specific condition,” Stejskalová explains.)
All this work is vital, given women’s health research has been so severely underfunded for so long—a trend that continues today. In one recent example, analysis from The Times showed that the UK government has committed 60% more funding for new men’s health research (for things like prostate cancer, men's suicide prevention, and substance abuse interventions for older men) than for women’s health research.
Dr. Nicola Tempest is a consultant gynecologist and works as a researcher with Wellbeing of Women, a UK-based women’s health charity which campaigns, provides education, and funds research. She uses endometrium-on-a-chip as well as human tissue in her research, and has a theory as to why women’s healthcare research has historically been so undervalued.
“I think at the beginning, it was because people thought that we didn't need women's health research, and they thought if we're doing research on men, then women are just little men,” she says, adding that, obviously, women’s bodies are entirely different.
Up until the 1990s, women were excluded from clinical trials, in part following the fallout from the thalidomide tragedy, where the drug used for morning sickness caused severe birth defects after it was taken by pregnant women. There was also a belief that fluctuating hormones and menstrual patterns would be too difficult to manage in trials, and future fertility could be impacted—all contributing to why the male body was treated as the norm.
Because of this exclusion, there are many areas where women-specific research is still needed, including how and why they experience heart attacks differently than men do, as opposed to extrapolating from research into heart attacks more generally.
“I do think that there has been a lot more hype around women's health, but that hasn't translated into funding yet,” Tempest says. “I still think that there are a lot of people in these high-up positions that choose who gets grants and who gets funding, that maybe don't see women's health at the forefront of what they think should be funded.”
With more vocal advocates around menopause in recent years, Tempest hopes there will now be deeper research into areas like Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). But even when there is more awareness, the research doesn’t always follow. She describes securing funding as an uphill battle, and often still finds herself having to sell the idea of women’s health.
The dearth of women’s research is not only due to a lack of funding, adds Dr. Stejskalová, but a lack female researchers—which means there’s no one in the room asking the right questions. A growing number of women in academia and the medical industry has been important for reshaping this ecosystem, she says, and so too have advocates championing the importance of this work.
Organ chips are revolutionizing healthcare, and the invention of chips specific to female anatomy offers a vital step for expanding that revolution across the gender spectrum. Now, we’re one step closer to having female bodies become the default for studying women’s health.
[post_title] => Female Futures on a Chip
[post_excerpt] => Could a USB-sized vagina model unlock women's healthcare?
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When slop doesn't sell, it pays to have a human touch.
Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersections of art, capital, and politics with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.
If the past five years of living with generative AI in the marketplace have taught us anything, it’s that management is depraved. Fewer employers, it seems, feel they owe their workers. The idea of reciprocity has vanished. Labor has been utterly devalued. Instead, our culture worships a parasitic class of billionaires who have nothing to offer but intellectual theft, political corruption, and insipid mediocrity; all delivered via infrastructure built by the taxpaying plebes whose futures they despise and destroy. As the 99% struggle month to month, there is not a single corner left uncut. Every manager in the country is shooting off the same squirt gun at the roaring wildfire that is coming to kill us all: Hey, what if we tried AI and let some people go?
Some background: This column does not pay my mortgage, nor does my creative practice. So, like almost everyone else in a creative field, I take plenty of non-creative work. While many writers have academic tendencies, because my own weird career has existed more in art than book publishing, my paying work has tended more toward PR and luxury branding. I enjoy it, and I am also lucky to often work for or with my friends. But starting roughly two years ago, around once a week, I began receiving emails about “changing editorial protocol to incorporate AI” that triggered a reaction in me comparable to Clark Griswold’s psychotic break when gifted a Jelly of the Month Club membership. (“It’s the gift that keeps on giving the whole year!”) More disconcerting than losing gig after gig to AI was the deeper conviction that the institutional rot and delusional technofascism that has dogged my adult life would definitely not course-correct in time for me to execute a successful career pivot in my 40s. I did not and do not have that kind of faith in our near future.
I wish I were writing from the trenches of late-stage capitalism; hell, I wish I were writing from the frontlines. But I’m not: As a freelance writer, I’m writing from the pine box. Or, more precisely, certain possibilities of my career are now buried in the pine box, as I am still very much alive and bitchy enough to point out that autocorrect tried to remove the subjunctive mood from the first sentence of this paragraph. Granted, this observation in and of itself probably won’t convince the average technocrat that we still need writers. (Jessica Lange voice: “There’s not going to be a subjunctive on Mars, you stupid slut!”) But nothing really needs to make sense when HAL 9000 is at the wheel; in our AI hellscape, grammar, syntax, and even good old cohesion are as quaint as trench warfare and, accordingly, have been left to die in No Man’s Land.
Despite the ubiquity of AI in public discourse, however, the freelance marketplace has recently changed its tune: Almost all the work I lost 18 to 24 months ago has started coming back.
I graduated from high school in 2000, so I have lived through three economic crashes during my adult working life. That’s also three times the lived experience necessary to know that—except for the friends who created opportunities for me as the market fell apart—no one has been hiring me back out of the goodness of their hearts. Instead, most of my freelance writing work has returned for one simple reason: Slop doesn’t sell.
These days, when I’m hired for freelance work, I am given the same brief: Leave some fingerprints. I am now paid not so much as a human who writes, but as a writer who can leave a human trace—usually after AI was used somewhere in the process before a project was handed off to me.
What, exactly, is a fingerprint? It’s a series of grooves that gain purchase, and leaves little slicks of oil and grease, the messy residue of humanity. For a writer, that means stylistic fingerprints. While there is a romance to handprints—from the Lascaux Caves to the Hollywood Walk of Fame—fingerprints evoke culpability. Long the gold standard in forensic criminology, there is disturbingly little standardization in how to match them, and fingerprints have led to a number of wrongful convictions. Somehow, this feels apt: Even as I am hired back, it serves as a chilling little reminder that the writer will be the first to blame if things don’t work out. Our prints will be all over the failure—whether or not it was really our fault.
We all have bills to pay, and AI has certainly gotten in the way of me paying mine. Simultaneously, like it or not, today, most working writers have a hybridized relationship with AI. To me, this means that it is incumbent upon the writer to define what AI can and cannot do. Primarily, AI is iterative. It proffers answers without construing a thing, barfing out facts devoid of comprehension. Limited by its lack of consciousness, AI has no depth, no shine: It might construct, but it cannot constellate. It’s not quite a misnomer to call AI “intelligence” if one reduces intelligence to mere problem-solving. However, the reduction in the meanings of the words “artificial” and “intelligence” is paired with a certain omnipotence and unknowability—much like the meanings of the words “plastic” and “cancer.” If AI can perform a “creative” task, that task was probably not creative at all. AI cannot touch the kind of ineffable expression that matters to me, those traces of human creativity that are, as one writer once put it, commensurate with our capacity for wonder. Call me Jungian (not that anyone ever would on a Zoom call), but I believe consciousness is required for creative output. The bigger question is why do we want to replace human creativity at all?
On a practical level, by all means, let AI take dictation and turn the transcript into notes with an outline—that, of course, will need a human who was paying attention to check. Let it kick off a round of brainstorming, if you must. I wouldn’t begrudge a bot a PowerPoint deck any more than I’d begrudge my washing machine dirty clothes. AI should make our lives simpler. It should do dishes or sort toxic chemicals or help researchers image cancer cells—not take musicians’ work. But, what’s at stake when we offload the latter is more than just losing work that pays, especially in creative fields we historically undervalue, yet need in order to make life tolerable. Just as we cannot trust the free market to take care of the vulnerable, we cannot entrust the arts or our cultural legacy to it, either.
So why are we developing a technology that could destroy life as we know it within a decade, according to whistleblowers with scripts straight out of B horror movies? The answer is that we are not; the ketamine-snorting tech buffoons we have let run amok are. It’s their bottom line, but it's our culture, communities, and environment. Technology ought to serve all levels of society, not merely our tech overlords who see everyone else as nothing but consumers to be chewed up and spat out—or occasionally as useful producers who can leave fingerprints that encourage said consumers to consume. We need to stop feeding the beast. Instead, we need class consciousness. We need a Works Progress Administration. And we need to identify, to protect, and to fund the creative class.
When I lost almost all my work, I focused on projects and people who made my life feel more expansive, even as my prospects for income dwindled. I took work that paid for travel and creative projects that garnered more bylines. Without fronting on my part, no one looking at my CV would have had any idea how much my confidence or my bank account were hurting. Arthur Jafa, who has a stunning retrospective at the New Museum, said the following during a recent talk when asked about his perception of his success: “There’s not a map, I can’t give you a map. And if I could, this is not the road you want to travel. This fucking shit is like hair-raising, you know what I mean? Like my hair is fucking gray.”
While I was enjoying what I consider the biggest professional and personal successes of my life thus far, I simply had no idea where the money would be coming from, and reasoned that was a preferable problem to have than being unhappy or creatively unfulfilled. I just panicked a lot, like a real adult. I had no idea when the money would appear, like a real artist. Now that the work has returned, I’m also still digging myself out from a giant deficit (interest is real, even if the emails one sends to chase invoices, apparently, are not); and freelancers are always paid last (one can essentially borrow against us and we are powerless to charge interest, though a Freelancers’ Payment Fund has been proposed in NYC).
I wouldn’t tell anyone to do as I say or as I do. That said, if generative AI has allowed me to realize anything, it’s the centrality of my own fingerprint. And I don’t mean that in terms of capital. I remain cynical as ever about that exchange, but also determined to continue to fund my silly little life. Rather, I mean it in the sense that Heraclitus expressed when he wrote that character is fate. Many, maybe most, don’t get to explore and exercise their potential. But, if you are so lucky, your own unique ability to world-build both by yourself and with those around you is what matters—and you don’t need a creative career to do so. No bot can take that away. No bot can do that at all.
If AI is a cheap trick of a Turing Test that just happens to be destroying the planet, I’ll take consciousness, chaos, and mess. I’ll take shouting into the wind until it knocks me down to the ground for good. That’s what artists of all stripes have been doing since time immemorial, and lucky are we to count their fingerprints among us, to keep us going through it all.
[post_title] => The Fingerprint Brief
[post_excerpt] => When slop doesn't sell, it pays to have a human touch.
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On Vashlovani Street, Tbilisi's queer community chooses joy.
Dozens of people line Vashlovani Street, passing cigarettes and sharing gossip as they take in some fresh air outside the packed Success Bar.
Inside Tbilisi’s oldest LGBTQ+ bar, founded in 2000, dozens more are dancing under the shimmering light of a disco ball as a rotating set of DJs spin records to fundraise for Palestine. Instead of a cover charge, the event organizers are asking for donations while an online map of queer sites in Gaza is projected on the wall.
Hosting public events like these is risky in Georgia due to laws criminalizing “LGBT propaganda,” yet this won’t be the only queer event in the country’s capital this past spring. Success Bar will also host a karaoke night, drag show, lip sync battle, and tarot reading. Friends will gather at the neighboring Mozaika and Mi Moza bars to share a drink in a safe space. Activists will also host a tour of Tbilisi’s LGBTQ+ heritage, including stops at sites honoring Soviet-era figures such as ballet dancer Vakhtang Chabukiani, film director Sergei Parajanov, and writer Elene Akhvlediani.
Nia Gvatua—owner of Success Bar, one of Georgia’s first LGBTQ+ bars—at a drag party in Tbilisi. (Lea Greub)
Locals have nicknamed this lone block of Vashlovani Street—with its mix of bars, restaurants, secondhand shops, and former NGO offices—“100 Meters of Freedom.” It symbolizes how, in light of increasingly restrictive laws and violence, Georgia’s queer community has carved out a small yet joyous space for itself, a space that grows increasingly difficult to preserve as the community flees Tbilisi for safer cities.
Gvantsa “Pertso” Pertia is a 25-year-old UX designer and Vespa aficionado who first got involved in community organizing in 2019. Their now-partner, Mariam Kvaratskhelia, had just co-founded Tbilisi Pride, a non-governmental organization that aimed to host an annual queer march—the country’s first. The inaugural march had to be rescheduled from June to July due to security concerns after government crackdowns against anti-Russia protesters; meanwhile, the powerful Orthodox Church criticized the event for going “against the Christian faith.” Yet Pertia remembers those early years fondly.
“Everything was not perfect, but right now we think that it was the golden period for queer activism,” Pertia tells me, speaking in English. Other LGBTQ+ campaigns would flourish during those years thanks to European funding—including from UN Women and the Eurasian Coalition on Men’s Health—supporting research on Georgia’s queer history. The transgender rights group Temida and the online platform GrlzWave would also reach tens of thousands with their social media campaigns about period poverty, safe sex, trans rights, and elections.
When the Covid-19 pandemic began, Pertia recalls Tbilisi’s queer community quickly organizing to support one another, with volunteers distributing hand sanitizers and food. Then, in 2021, Tbilisi Pride held its second Pride march, despite counter-protesters attacking marchers before the event could get underway. Thousands of people, including at least a dozen Orthodox priests, had gathered nearby, chanting anti-LGBTQ slogans and burning a rainbow banner.
Vashlovani Street from above. (Lea Greub)
Pertia was there, and remembers some of the counter-protesters trying to physically seize the LGBTQ marchers. One grabbed Pertia before they heard a loud explosion, and suddenly felt they were “shot with something” to the stomach, which knocked them to the ground. More than 50 people, including human rights advocates and journalists, were injured. Pertia has offered testimony in a case that’s expected to be brought before the European Court of Human Rights.
“It was five years ago but it's still a really big trauma for queer society,” they say.
In 2022, Tbilisi Pride held a small festival and a film screening, but no march. The next year, counter-protesters attacked the group’s private festival, forcing Pertia and their friends to evacuate. Photos of thousands of men waving Georgian flags and setting fires at the festival circulated in the international media in the days after.
This rise in physical violence against Georgia’s LGBTQ+ community had deeper roots: It corresponded with a rise in hateful political rhetoric from the ruling Georgian Dream party.
Following the start of its full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022, Russia began exerting growing influence over Georgia. That December, the government adopted a gender equality framework that was lauded by international organizations, even as Georgia’s queer activists feared it erased transgender people from the public sphere by defining only two sexes. In May 2023, then-Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili traveled to Budapest to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he warned of “coercing false freedoms” like “LGBTQ+ propaganda.” “Our main weapon and foundation is traditional, Christian, conservative, family values,” he declared.
Within a year, Garibashvili’s government designated May 17, long recognized as the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, as “Day of Family Purity and Respect for Parents.” It also passed a “Foreign Agents" law requiring non-governmental organizations that received more than 20% of their funding from outside the country to register with the government. The law particularly impacted LGBTQ+, women’s, and press freedom groups that drew funding from largely European donors. It also adopted a “Law on Family Values and Protection of Minors” that criminalized LGBTQ+ "propaganda." The Georgian Dream party would go on to win re-election in a 2024 race widely regarded as rigged.
“Fuck Russia” written at a bus stop during a demonstration against the “Foreign Agents” law. (Lea Greub)
“We cannot talk about LGBT (issues) because it's ‘popularization,’” Pertia says, referring to the law banning public gatherings, displaying rainbow flags, and LGBTQ+ books and films. “You cannot get any medical support if you are trans because a doctor can go to prison for many years. I cannot have this LGBT tattoo on me because they can fine me,” they say, pointing to a rainbow flag on their upper arm.
As the risks of being out in public continued escalating, Tbilisi Pride decided not to host a celebration in 2024. The landscape for Georgia’s entire LGBTQ+ community grew even more challenging the following year, when the government passed a second law strengthening the foreign agents law.
“We are acting for Georgia's interests, not for foreign countries. I'm working for Georgia's queer community,” says Mariam Guliashvili, a strategic communications and advocacy officer at the Equality Movement, one of Georgia’s oldest and largest LGBTQ+ service providers. The new foreign agent laws have created “a lot of self-censorship practices,” she says, forcing many NGOs to quit. Despite cuts to the psychological support programs they once offered, the Equality Movement is still offering HIV/AIDS testing, counseling, and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medication to prevent HIV transmission. “Every employee is now working mainly on a voluntary basis or on very low wages.”
Many LGBTQ+ Georgians, however, don’t have that privilege, and have sought asylum in Belgium or Spain. Guliashvili has decided to stay. “I'm not judging no one for leaving the country or giving up,” she says, “because we have been living in horror for the last three years.”
Artist and activist Lucrezia performing during a drag ball at Mtkvarze. (Lea Greub)
At the women’s and LGBTQ+ rights group GrlzWave, project leads Martha Geliashvili and Inga Ghoghoberidze say they and most of their colleagues have second jobs or freelance projects that support their activism. Nonetheless, when I sat with the pair on an unseasonably warm day in May at a cafe near Vashlovani Street, they told me GrlzWave was organizing film and book clubs focused on women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. The group is also using its online platform to publish videos about Georgia’s political prisoners, like journalist Mzia Amaglobeli, who was arrested at a 2025 anti-regime protest. “We are talking to them, family members, because propaganda is working and they are trying to dehumanize these people,” said Ghoghoberidze. All of these political prisoners remain behind bars.
As May spilled into summer, the teams at GrlzWave, the Equality Movement, and the former Tbilisi Pride found new ways to celebrate Pride Month. In June, dozens of LGBTQ+ organizers turned out for a “Queer Community Camp” organized by Pertia and fellow former members of Tbilisi Pride. After a weekend in the countryside spent practicing yoga and attending workshops on LGBTQ+ art and history, the organizers returned re-energized and ready to host a “Queer Corner” at an international music festival in Tbilisi in July. In social media posts on their new social media platform, Queer Initiative, Pertia can be seen beaming as they dance at the festival in a pink muscle tee that reads “I let femmes top me” and a rainbow bead-lined sun hat.
A fun and feminist debut horror novel that's equal parts delectable and disgusting.
From the moment I picked up a copy of the one-of-a-kind Carrying, I had a feeling it would be equal parts gaudy, sincere, and gross: The debut novel’s neon green cover is taken up by a perfectly plump roast chicken, its legs splayed, an egg cradled between them, almost like an invitation. To what, exactly, I couldn’t yet know.
After finishing it, I wasn’t surprised to learn its author Samantha Josephs is passionate about cooking and baking. “I own a blowtorch for crème brûlée and a cast iron weight to get the perfect sear. I’m not messing around,” she declared in a recent interview. In her novel, Josephs takes that love of food and channels it into her main character, Martha, an all-American fantasy of the beautiful, doting, husband-pleasing housewife. “I wanted to turn that on its head and write about something disgusting that’s somehow completely delicious,” Josephs said.
Carrying may be delicious to the reader, but not to poor Martha. Only a few pages in, we find out her life is less than picture-perfect: Her husband and teenage step-daughter have no idea that she is trans. She is deeply insecure, obsessed with her image and with keeping up with the Joneses. Afraid that her husband Leon will leave her (or worse) if he finds out she isn’t biologically female, Martha feigns a miscarriage and pretends to get her period month after month. She also knows she can’t conceive the child Leon desperately wants, so when her husband asks her to consider a fertility clinic, she plays along and appeases him, enlisting the help of her longtime friend Roger, who also happens to be her gynecologist and the only person who knows the truth.
Martha is precariously navigating this increasingly complex web when she starts getting sick, feeling sluggish, and acting moody, until one day—surprise!—she finds out she is pregnant. Leon is thrilled, yet Martha refuses to believe it until Roger confirms it is, indeed, a medical miracle. What’s even more surprising is when Martha discovers that the only thing that seems to keep her from feeling nauseous is a strange diet of rotting meat. By day, she continues cooking perfect meals for her family; by night, she drives around the empty streets of Los Angeles, looking for her next hit.
The anxieties in Martha’s story start early on—long before we find out she is carrying or trans. At times, they are painfully funny: “She’d give anything to be completely content wrinkled like a walrus, bramble-bush tangled mane, flab flying wildly in the wind.” For the most part, though, Martha’s internal dialogue is just plain painful. “Martha feels zero guilt for waiters, coworkers, friends, strangers, anyone else, assuming she’s a cis woman—that’s the entire point. She does not want to live life on the margins, forever, marked by some cruel joke at birth. By passing, she undoes her own monstrosity. Nobody looks at her differently, as less than, as a perverted freak, as something to spread scary stories about,” Josephs writes.
In a sense, Martha is a symbol for all women; for anyone who has existed in a female-identifying body seeking male approval. What else can we call the pressure to be conventionally feminine, to keep up with beauty standards, if not horror? What about the financial and emotional dependence on a spouse, the feelings of jealousy for one’s imaginary competition, the awareness of being seen as little more than a vessel?
For every patriarchal monstrosity experienced by cis women, the stakes are always multiple times worse for our trans counterparts. “Passing is seen as the goal by many trans women, not just for being seen as who you are, but also that it may promise freedom from the hardships of trans life,” said Josephs, who is also trans, in an interview. A semi-retired drag queen-turned-writer of podcasts, video games, and erotica, Josephs infuses her main character’s past with much of her own. “As I’ve experienced it myself, I’ve found that passing is also completely stressful and anxiety inducing. While it was hard before when I didn’t pass to not be seen for who I am, there is a new stress in passing and fearing that people will find out.”
Likewise, the better Martha gets at passing, the more she is afraid of being found out. Her perfect body has a creature growing inside of it, as an undiagnosed chronic illness takes hold, further transforming her body in ways out of her control. Experts on transgender medicine examine her, unbeknownst to her family: “Martha gets poked, prodded, and probed. They take samples of her blood, urine, feces, sweat, mucus, throat, hair, and vaginal discharge… She feels like a two-headed calf, groped and gawked at under a microscope,” Josephs writes. She also (secretly) seeks out alternative treatments for her undiagnosable illness, which her husband believes to be morning sickness; and increasingly indulges in her bizarre and outright disgusting cravings until all of it is too much to bear. Her seemingly perfect life unravels.
Carrying may be fiction—a particular kind of surrealist horror—yet it is also the stuff of study and analysis, and deeply rooted in reality. In 2019, Spanish trans philosopher and writer, Paul B. Preciado, wrote about the experimental nature of trans bodies, for better and worse, and about the right to their reproduction in his chronicle of his own crossing, An Apartment on Uranus. “Until now, we have paid for our gender, sexual and bodily dissidence with the genetic silence of our chromosomes. We have not just been deprived of the transmission of economic patrimony: our genetic patrimony has also been confiscated. Homosexuals, transsexuals, and bodies regarded as ‘handicapped,’ we have been politically sterilized or else we have been forced to reproduce with heterosexual techniques. The present battle to extend MAP (Medically Assisted Procreation) to non-heterosexual bodies is a political and economic war to depathologize our forms of life and to maintain control of our reproductive cells.”
Martha is as complex a character as any in literature. Like Madame Bovary, she is facing the realities of what it means to be a woman. The costs of becoming a mother, too, are excruciating, yet with the help of medicine and technology, she is able to reinvent herself into a life that’s equal parts fairy tale and horror movie. She is a human beset by the pressures of late stage capitalism, living beyond its structures of gender and power in all their messy glory. Perhaps the biggest tragedy is that only the reader—and not Martha herself—get the privilege to see it.
[post_title] => Book of the Month: "Carrying" by Samantha Josephs
[post_excerpt] => A fun and feminist debut horror novel that's equal parts delectable and disgusting.
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Horror allegorizes problems; it sorts problems; it describes problems; it plays out problems. What it does not do is solve them, and this intractability is the main theme of the most gripping book of horror I have read as an adult. Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad is a triumph of the genre, but it is also one where the monster, if allegorical, is also very real. Set in 2005 in the depths of chaos and terror of the US invasion of Iraq, Frankenstein in Baghdad gives us no scientist striving to know the nature of the human soul, toying with fate, daring to play God. Its creature—known as Whatsitsname—is likewise not a science experiment, but a metonymic tour guide through a sort of magical realist house of horrors—the sort of inane horrors that could only ensue from an American invasion in the name of “democracy.” (Here, we might pause to note that the acknowledged masterpiece of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude, was also inspired by a US-backed atrocity.) The fright is not merely a fun spook on the pages, but rather a stand-in for death, rage, tribalism, pain, gore, and the absurdities of fate.
Published nearly 200 years prior, Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein was subtitled “The Modern Prometheus,” after the Greek myth about the god who, punished for giving fire to humans, was tied to a mountainside, doomed to have his liver devoured by raptors each day. The Greeks knew the liver regenerates, so accordingly this punishment would be eternal: Prometheus’ liver regrew every night. (A fair bit of body horror!) Sadaawi’s book, on the other hand, begins with a shady junkyard dealer named Hadi, whose main passions are whoring and ouzo, when he can afford them. Despite—or perhaps because of—his knowledge of his own degeneracy (is there ever really a difference?), he muses that the many dismembered body parts around town—thanks to both the US invasion and the vicious sectarian violence in its wake—deserve a proper burial.
A tinkerer, Hadi is quite handy with needle and thread, and, for those of you familiar with the source material, you can guess what happens next. Once enough body parts have been stitched together, the timely (or untimely) demise of a local security guard in an explosion renders his body a vaporous “pink mist” devoid of solid pieces, thus delivering a Shelleyan soul to the oozing, squishy, rotting patchwork of flesh. Whatsitsname is born. It’s alive!
While the original novel is subtitled for an actual god who gifted fire to mankind, the idea of human daring so sacrilege as to generate life (outside of, you know, fucking) is endlessly fascinating (like fucking). The ghost story is undoubtedly as old as camp fires, Promethean and otherwise. But gothic horror has its roots in a very particular moment in history, relevant to Shelley in a different (if also very scary) way compared with the historical context that informed Saadawi.
Apropos of fucking, the summer Mary Shelley started writing the book featured one hell of a Regency romp. After absconding to Europe in the wake of sex scandals too numerous and incestuous to list here, Mary Shelley, her new husband, Percy, and Lord Byron, among others, found themselves in Switzerland.
That climate catastrophe which gifted the world the gothic genre would also decide the fate of nations. Its global ramifications lasted for years. There was no summer of 1816. Europe, already reeling from the destruction of the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815, sank into crop failure and misery that crystallized lower class discontent into political radicalism and revolt in the coming decades. In New England, the following winter after the lack of summer was dubbed “Eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death.” The region was so cold, it partly depopulated, driving the westward migration that would soon anoint itself “Manifest Destiny.” In South Asia, cholera killed at unprecedented rates, weakening empires and making way for total British conquest and greater European colonial incursion into Asia. That legacy and the United States’ subsequent 20th-century rebranding of empire set the stage for the horrors of Frankenstein in Baghdad, even if Mary Shelley provided the plot.
Caitlin McCormack
Sadaawi first published his update of Shelley’s tale, replete with djinns, genie folklore, and American incompetence, in 2013. It won a brace of major awards before Jonathan Wright translated it in 2018, winning it many more.
All that time—and still to this day—the book is wretchedly timely. Whatsitname initially seeks revenge upon evil, but that task in and of itself is a mire of gray areas and contradictions. Beyond the murky, moral ambiguity of seeking revenge in a sectarian conflict set loose by a brutal invasion, Whatsitsname is plagued by “serious putrefaction problems.” These, in turn, force it to be more indiscriminate in picking its victims simply to harvest body parts he needs to replace.
The violence literally feeds on itself and the moral imperative doubles back. The wacky plot descends into the Pynchonian (e.g., a “Tracking and Pursuit Department” becomes a focal point); Whatsitsname grows media savvy and gives the following soundbite: “Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds—ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes—I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citizen.”
Though it is perhaps implied, one reason I hastened to name-check Young Frankenstein is that there is no describing Frankenstein in Baghdad without emphasizing its hilarity. The absurd premise of the book careens between horrors, but it never strays far from the sense of humor that, as the book suggests, is the next best thing to a moral compass. Sometimes, it’s all you’ve got left.
Rare is the book that will make you tear up, throw up, and crack up in a single chapter. Like Whatsitsname, it’s stitched together of too many parts to be identifiable as any single genre other than human. Whatsitsname is a metaphor for messes left behind, vendettas at tragic cross purposes, hopes of coexistence wrecked and rotting, but it is also a metaphysical mystery to behold, a sign of faith and of ruin. The “monster”’s name is dead-on.
In the original, Mary Shelley herself wrote an admonishment that could easily be applied to Western Imperialism: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow." Perhaps the United States itself is the closest thing to an arrogant mad scientist forcing both its beliefs and its hierarchies on the ancient city of Baghdad—daring to play God by wanting to remake a country in its own image and, in the process, unleashing every demon from the depths of hell.
Ahmed Sadaawi rips out the soul of a Western metaphysical classic to attempt to describe the horrors that a soulless, thoughtless Western invasion unleashed. It’s alive: The elegance and grotesque totality of the metaphor are complete.
[post_title] => The Monster Mash of Imperialism
[post_excerpt] => Some spooky seasonal appreciation for Ahmed Saadawi’s "Frankenstein in Baghdad."
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Meet the community of survivors and activists behind South Korea’s first national war memorial for civilians.
I was summoned to Korea by an uncle who died 19 years before I was born. Through a series of chance encounters and unexpected opportunities, I was led by his ghost from my home in New York City to the central lowland city of Daejeon. From there, I traveled 20 minutes southeast to the remote valley where I am nearly certain he was killed, according to family members, news articles, and historical accounts.
Arriving on a bitterly cold winter day in 2024, I saw hundreds of white ribbons fluttering handwritten messages into the wind; they marked the barren clearing as a site of active mourning. A painting tied to the bare limb of a maple tree depicted a defiant young woman wearing a white minbok, standing beside a river of blood. Black letters tumbled down the right edge of the canvas: Who is it? In the heart of the nation, black-bullet gunners.
A tour bus to transport the grief keepers to the Golryeonggol massacre site.
Once called Golryeonjae for the dragon-shaped ridge along its northern edge, this valley held a hideous secret for decades. At the beginning of the Korean War, U.S.-backed South Korean troops and local police executed between 4,900 to 7,000 civilians here in a 10-day frenzy of anti-communist violence. The victims included thousands of political prisoners who’d been held at Daejeon Prison.
In recent years, the 1.5-kilometer stretch of pit graves has come to be known in Korea as “the longest grave in the world.” But family members of the victims and local organizers call it Golryeonggol (骨靈), the valley where the spirits of the bones dwell.
They would know. In 2020, they dug through the earth with their own hands to retrieve bones, teeth, shoes, buttons, and U.S.-made bullet casings. It was the third exhumation—and the first organized by civilians, who’d become frustrated by the slow progress of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Exhumed remains at Sejong Memorial House.
Digging was their visceral initiation into the highest order of han (한): the embodied anguish and rage accumulated in the collective soul of my people, who have survived colonialism, a proxy war that killed an estimated 3.8 million Korean civilians in three years, and the cleaving of our homeland in rapid succession. It’s no wonder family members of the victims and local activists tend to this land as if it were a living being. They are its grief keepers.
Over the years, they’ve developed an elaborate communal practice of han puri—an externalized expression of han to release it from the body. By publicly healing a historical wound, they’ve also nurtured a fragile sense of possibility. After 26 years of organizing and six mass exhumations (the most recent in 2024), the Golryeonggol grief keepers are on the cusp of achieving their shared dream. In November, the South Korean government will prepare the mass grave site for the construction of Daejeon Peace Park, the country’s first and only national memorial to civilian victims of the war.
~
I made that first trip to Golryeonggol, accompanied by an interpreter and a friend, six months after my uncle first made himself known to me. I brought a suitcase full of fresh fruit, three gift boxes of dried persimmons, two bottles of makkgeolli, and a platter of fried fish. I’d come to perform a jesa, the ritual offering of food and drink Koreans do to care for the spirits of their ancestors.
Chun Mi Kyung (Chun Imo), President of the Daejeon Massacre Bereaved Families Association.
An offering of makkgeolli.
We were greeted outside a small building by an elegant matriarch named Chun Mi Kyung, whose father was killed in the massacre. Though her official title is President of the Daejeon Massacre Bereaved Families Association, I’ve come to think of her as the head grief keeper of Golryeonggol. Within minutes of our arrival, she and two other members of the association had washed the fruit, stacked the food on platters, and arranged carved wooden vessels on the floor.
When she noted the uncertainty in my face, Chun Imo (a respectful and affectionate word for maternal aunt, which she invited me to call her) gestured for me to kneel on the floor. She wrapped my hands around one of the vessels, filled it with makkgeolli, and moved my hands in three counterclockwise circles around the incense. Like an orchestra conductor, she guided me through two full prostrations before she, the other elders, and my companions paid their respects. After we concluded, the aunties cut up the fruit and passed the plates around as we shared our stories.
“Your uncle and all the people who were killed here, they are all my fathers,” Chun Imo said. “We take care of all of them just like we do our own dads.”
A jesa table at Sejong Memorial House, a forensic mortuary where the association performs regular ceremonies. The remains of 1,441 Golryeonggol victims are held here, as well as the remains of thousands of war crime victims from around the country.
During the 2020 civilian exhumation, Chun Imo and other members of the association discovered that many of the remains had been waterlogged and broken by construction.
“I slept alone in this house with the bones for days,” she said, sweeping her hands above the altar table to show where they had spread the fragments to dry. “But I was not afraid. At night I walk the grounds here with only the light from the moon. I take care of the spirits, and they watch over me.”
Prostrating before the spirits of the ancestors.
Later, as we said our goodbyes, Chun Imo grasped both my hands in hers and told me to come back for the community memorial ceremony, held annually at the end of June.
“I will see you here next year,” she said.
~
I traveled again to Daejeon this past June for the memorial, arriving at the clearing to find hundreds of people sitting under a massive white tent. Most were elders whose shrunken bodies told the story of wartime starvation. Paper lanterns dangling from surrounding trees cast a warm glow on faces ravaged by sun, time, and grief. Beneath the lanterns, a row of wooden easels held framed black-and-white portraits of the dead.
Son Bok Seong, whose husband's older brother was killed at Golryeonggol.
The opening ritual was a sangyeo procession, a Korean funeral bier. Four men carried a palanquin with a symbolic corpse of paper-cut chrysanthemums. A fifth man led them in a call-and-response song with a melancholy, strident melody. Late into the night, we sat with our restless ancestors through music, poetry, and shamanic rituals, plus a drum dance to accompany wandering spirits to the afterlife.
The next morning, we reconvened for Buddhist death rites, a Catholic sermon, and the formal jesa ceremony. I found my uncle in the center of the banner inscribed with the names of victims. Below it, a massive table sagged under dozens of platters piled high with traditional altar food.
A feast of plenty to remind the dead we know how they suffered.
~
It wasn’t safe to speak on the Daejeon Massacre publicly until the mid-2000s, let alone grieve its victims openly. In the absence of a formal peace agreement, the South Korean government waged an ideological war within its borders. It continues to this day under the banner of national security. Surveillance, disappearances, torture, and blacklists of anyone associated with leftists were once common enough that a generation of South Koreans blotted “red” relatives from their family histories.
A mourner covers his face.
The 1950 Daejeon Massacre was the largest in a vicious spree of civilian executions during that first summer of the war. It was carried out by President Syngman Rhee's military police, formally under U.S. wartime command beginning July 14. They targeted known leftists and people suspected of being sympathizers simply for being poor; the government had registered hundreds of thousands of them in a “political rehabilitation program” called the Bodo League in 1949. All told, the South Korean military police killed between 100,000 and 300,000 of its own civilians.
For decades, relatives of the victims, including my own, grieved in secrecy to avoid the scrutiny of successive right-wing dictatorships installed by the United States after the 1953 armistice. I understand why after meeting Chun Imo: Long after her father was executed, her eldest uncle was abducted by police and her brother poisoned by right-wing assailants. After years of being blacklisted, her youngest uncle died by suicide, her grandfather eventually lost his mind from repeated shocks, and Chun Imo herself moved to another town where no one knew her family.
Chun Mi Kyung (Chun Imo), President of the Daejeon Massacre Bereaved Families Association.
The long silence finally broke in 1992, when a left-leaning magazine called Mal (말, translated literally as Word) published the first exposé about the massacre. A novelist writing under the pseudonym Noh Gah-won interviewed a former police officer who had participated in the killing. He described how soldiers and policemen shot row after row of people until the valley was “a sea of blood.” Among the scenes he described, corroborated in subsequent years by eyewitness accounts, one detail roiled the magma of my han: U.S. soldiers had watched from the ridges surrounding the massacre site. One of them, Major Leonard J. Abbott, got close enough to take 18 grisly photos of the massacre in progress (declassified by the U.S. in 1999). They include a few shots of victims who look like teenagers, staring into the camera—immortalized on the threshold of death in the archive of a U.S. proxy conflict my high school teachers called “the Forgotten War.”
The Mal exposé might have also been forgotten if not for Sim Kyu Sang, an activist from the Daejeon region who was serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence at Andong Prison. Sim, who’d been incarcerated for participating in a building takeover during the 1990 Seoul student protests, grabbed the magazine from a pile of periodicals delivered to the prison when he saw the headline. Following his release a year later, he went to a senior center in the area and asked people who were old enough to remember. They refused to speak, other than to tell him they’d been warned by local police officers to report anyone who asked questions about the massacre.
Human rights activist Sim Kyu Sang, who now serves as the Daejeon bureau chief of Oh My News.
Sim Kyu Sang with Im Jae Geun, executive chair of the Daejeon Sannae Golryeonggol Countermeasure Committee and director of the Research Institute for Peace and Unification Education.
Sim wandered through the mountains for weeks until he identified the silhouetted mountain in one of the Mal magazine photographs. He walked into the valley and saw human bones and teeth scattered everywhere. The subsistence farmers who owned the land admitted they’d thrown out piles of human remains they’d found while plowing.
~
Hoping to halt the continued desecration of the victims, Sim attempted to publish a new story about the massacre for the next four years. No outlet would touch it until 2000, when both Mal and Oh My News published his citizen journalist report. Thereafter, he was inundated with phone calls from family members of the victims, who beseeched him to show them the site. In July 2000, he gathered the members of 16 families at Golryeonggol for the first time. They howled and wept for three hours.
In the years that followed, more people joined their kinship of grief, confronting together what no one person could bear to face alone. They became a living embodiment of jeong (정)—the Korean relational ethic of deep collective care, powerful enough to soothe our han. After incorporating as an NGO in 2007, the group evolved into a hub of local organizing for government accountability. Working in solidarity with similar associations across Korea, the Golryreonggol grief keepers have traveled to Seoul on numerous occasions to push forward the government’s tepid Truth and Reconciliation process. After a 2010 investigation, the commission concluded the state had acted illegally, holding itself and Syngman Rhee responsible for executing “incarcerated prisoners without due process solely on the grounds that they had a history of leftist activity or were suspected of sympathizing with the Korean People’s Army.”
Mourners gather to pay their respects at the Golryeonggol massacre site.
In 2016, South Korea’s government announced it would create a memorial peace park for civilian victims of the state from before, during, and after the war. It invited applications from local governments nationwide to host the project. Of the seven cities that submitted bids, Golryeonggol made a compelling case due to the scale of the massacre and the geographical range of the victims held at Daejeon Prison. Its team, led by Sim, was eventually selected by the national evaluation committee.
Like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission itself, progress on the memorial has depended on whether the national government leans right or left. In 2021, a large-scale excavation unearthed the remains of nearly 1,000 victims at Golryeonggol, lending new momentum to the project under the left-leaning administration of President Moon Jae-in. This came to a grinding halt under the far-right President Yoon Suk-yeol, who wanted to destroy the remains—a plan foiled by his impeachment.
Park Jun Su, whose father was executed at Golryeonggol.
Given their tumultuous journey, the grief keepers are understandably skeptical that they will live long enough to see the memorial. But Sim is confident construction will begin in December, now that the government has made a formal announcement and appropriated more than $48 million USD for it.
In the meantime, thousands of tormented spirits still need care. Knowing my uncle died violently and far from home, I feel deep gratitude for Chun Imo’s jeong with the souls of so many victims.
“Sometimes they cry out to me from hunger and sadness,” Chun Imo says.
When they do, she cooks an elaborate meal, sets the altar table with plates piled high, and invites the wandering spirits to eat.
A traditional ancestor table at Golryeonggol to mark Chuseok (Full Moon Harvest).
[post_title] => The Grief Keepers
[post_excerpt] => Meet the community of survivors and activists behind South Korea’s first national war memorial for civilians.
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My father left Somalia in 1982 to study engineering on a scholarship in Washington D.C. Then, a war began in his absence and changed the course of his life.
In the winter of 2021, forty years after his departure, I boarded a flight with him ready to see Mogadishu for the first time. My grandmother gone, my father wanted to track down his childhood home and divide the proceeds from its sale among his siblings.
The house was in poor condition, the concrete and stone badly damaged. My father was disoriented. He lamented that he did not recognize the neighborhood—the Hodan District—or the route we took there. So much had changed, been leveled or lost. What remained was in ruins.
~
I grew up in Portland, Oregon. I spent my days daydreaming in class and my evenings on the internet where I befriended other Somali girls from around the world. We were young and earnest and thought our angst made us exceptional. We were embarrassingly self-fetishizing. We didn’t want to be reduced to our identities, yet secretly feared they were the most interesting thing about us. We were raised on nostalgia, took it into our bodies like milk from our mothers.
We were born in the rupture of the archive, in its lapse.
Two weeks before our trip to Mogadishu, I stumbled down a staircase and hurt my ankle—a hairline fracture caused by repetitive strain, as opposed to a single discrete injury. The importance of strong ankles is basic physics: they dictate the force with which one can meet the world.
Traveling with my father, I walked with a limp; I could not bear my own weight. I took pictures of everything in an attempt to find my place in the rift between him and his fate, between his history and the history of his country.
To this day, my ankle buckles beneath me if I step the wrong way, instability no longer a condition but a fixture of my body.
~
Somalia’s borders were not drawn by clans, but through colonial contracts. Italy claimed the south, England the north, but in Djibouti, it is France’s legacy that lives on.
The proof of these colonial horrors can be found in the museums of Europe, alongside much of Africa’s plundered heritage. In 1923, Benito Mussolini inaugurated Rome's Colonial Museum in the Palazzo della Consulta which housed, at its height, over 12,000 artifacts stolen from its African colonies—Somalia, Libya, and Eritrea. In 1940, it was moved to a larger location and renamed the Museum of Italian Africa. With the outbreak of World War II, the museum fell into neglect. A damning relic of a defeated regime. Its archives were boxed away.
The history of the modern museum cannot be separated from the history of empire. Almost eight decades later, Italy’s colonial archives were transferred to the Museum of Civilizations in Rome which curated a project titled “The Museum of Opacities” in an attempt to critically examine Italy’s colonial past as it absorbed thousands of artifacts. The exhibit invoked French philosopher Édouard Glissant’s assertion that a people have a “right to opacity.” That is, something in each of us and our histories that cannot be translated, easily understood, catalogued, or contained.
~
When my father took me to see Somalia's national monuments, my uncle and cousin joined us. We started at the Somali Youth League memorial, a plaza dedicated to the young activists who played a key part in the movement for independence. Next was Daljirka Dahsoon, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and Hawo Tako, a woman who watched over the city with a torch in her hand and an arrow through her heart. Then we saw the Seyed, father of the Dervish Movement, disparagingly called the Mad Mullah by the British, seated atop his famed steed in Mogadishu’s city center. A short distance away was Taalada Dhagaxtuur, the statue of an anonymous stone-thrower, symbolizing the brave men who fought the British with nothing but stones and the steel in their spines.
None of these statues are the originals, all of which were destroyed at the start of the Somali Civil War, their bronze and stone limbs reduced to scrap and sold to neighboring countries. We took pictures in front of their doppelgangers.
We wandered the streets of Mogadishu and the streets of memory. Our last stop of the day was the Somali National Museum, but it was closed to the public. Built by the Sultan of Zanzibar, the building dates back to 1872 before it was converted into Somalia’s first public museum, the Museo della Garesa, by the Italian colonial administration in 1933. Its collection included roughly 3,000 items, serving as an archive of Italian military history. For the colonial administration, it also served as proof that the Italians had created order out of chaos, and preserved what would have otherwise been lost.
It would not be the building’s last transformation.
In 1960, seventeen African countries, including Somalia, gained independence from colonial rule. Less than a decade later, General Siad Barre seized power in a military coup and the Supreme Revolutionary Council adopted Scientific Socialism as Somalia's state doctrine.
As political, economic, and cultural ties between Somalia and the USSR deepened, a team of Soviet scholars arrived in Mogadishu in 1971 for an archaeological expedition aimed at decolonizing Somali history. The scholars sought to forge a continuous chain of rebellion by linking the Dervish Movement in the late 19th century to Siad Barre's 1969 coup, casting Somalis as both victors of an unbroken struggle and heirs to its liberation.
The construction of a new national museum and the preservation of the country’s cultural heritage became top priorities for the new government, and the 1987 completion of the Somali National Museum was hailed as a great achievement by UNESCO.
But the promise of the young republic was usurped by a ruinous civil war. The museum was looted, its collection stolen and sold, then scattered as far and wide as Somalia's people.
~
In the fall of 2024, my friends Aziz Farah and Ibrahim Hirsi, cultural workers with no formal training in art history or curation, joined forces with Asha Noor, a higher education professional, and Idel Rasheed, a researcher and curator, to launch Koor Archives, a traveling exhibition dedicated to preserving Somali heritage. Though they live in four different countries— Canada, the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom—they are bound by their shared commitment to the tangible and intangible elements of Somali culture.
Aziz and Ibrahim met earlier that year at Piasa, a French auction house that was selling the lifetime collection of Pierre Loos, a Belgian “tribal art dealer.” They successfully bid on 45 Somali headrests. The next day, they spent hours wandering through a Parisian flea market and stumbled upon a Brazilian dealer of East African art. After some haggling, they acquired a cache of books and a traditional Somali amber necklace. Their collection has since grown substantially, culled from galleries, private collections, estate sales, online auctions, street vendors in Somalia’s back alleys, and donations from families and friends.
Their search has exposed them to the political economy of antiquities, an underworld built on expropriation and dispossession. They spend time on Facebook forums where people clash over what constitutes art, where African artifacts are described as primitive, even as they exchange hands for thousands of dollars, buying Somali artifacts from non-Somalis, often at exorbitant prices, and haggling with strangers over the right to their own heritage.
In Somalia, the buying and selling of antiquities is unregulated. There is a network of impoverished residents who steal items from graves and sell them to local dealers. And while most of Africa’s cultural heritage remains in Europe due to centuries of colonialism, Turkey and the UAE’s increased influence in the region has resulted in what Aziz calls a “second plunder.” One antique seller in Mogadishu tells Ibrahim that Arabs and Turks are now his most frequent customers.
Some of the items in the Koor Archives’ collection make Aziz and Ibrahim uncomfortable, like the taxidermy mounts of gazelle and antelope heads, their faces frozen since they were hunted in 1910. “Europeans loved their trophies,” Aziz says. The duo dream of returning them to Somalia where they can be properly laid to rest.
In many ways, Koor is what Françoise Vergès, the French postcolonial scholar and curator, calls the anti-museum: a space that uplifts a poetics of ordinary life and invests in communal stewardship, both the tangible and intangible elements of Somali culture, including oral traditions, poetry, music and song, and collective memory. In Frantz Fanon’s theory of decolonization this kind of rupture is “a program of complete disorder.” The anti-museum, then, might be understood as an attempt to reconstitute what Fanon describes as a world “cut in two”: a world of buyers and sellers, objects and owners. A program that dares to emancipate both the imagination and archive.
Koor is a project of love and disorder, the only forces strong enough to upend “a world of statues" and bring into being a world with no masters and no marble gods.
In their first public exhibit in Toronto of over 100 rare Somali artifacts back in the summer of 2024, three generations of a single family—a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter—stood around a loox, a wooden tablet used to read and write the Quran. Elders shared memories of learning the holy book this way. Someone recalled the process of making ink. Another spoke of trees sprouting from the dirt where the ink of sacred verses had been rinsed. The verses they first read on the loox were inscribed not only on wood, but on their hearts.
~
Long before I met Aziz and Ibrahim, I took my grandmother to the only Somali Museum in North America, in Minneapolis. I expected her to share my excitement, but she was dismissive. “We have these things at home,” she said.
It was true: In our garage in Portland were several xeedho, woven containers central to her tribe’s wedding customs, which she’d lovingly protected from dust in hopes of saving them for my own wedding.
She looked at the wooden fandhaals on display and said: “This is a spoon. Why is a spoon in a museum?”
I did not yet know to question the museum’s logic, its bureaucratic and lifeless classification of the world. My grandmother was impervious to this conditioning. To her, these items were ordinary, pedestrian staples of everyday life.
Years later, wandering the Africa collection at the British Museum, I marveled at the Somali artifacts sealed behind display cases. I knew there were even more hidden within the museum’s bowels. I pressed my hand to the glass that separated me from them and them from the world—a checkpoint I could not cross. Each artifact bore a date of acquisition wed to the name of the donor, the seller, the excavator, the field collector.
I thought of the feet that once wore the leather sandals on display, imagined the roads they tread. The woman who held her long hair over the smoke of a glazed incense burner. The fingers of the blacksmith wrapped around his iron hammer. The shield of hide and wood and the human heart it once protected from harm.
I look at the pictures from my 2021 trip to Mogadishu, I see our smiling faces, our skin glistening with sun and sweat. My uncle has since died, but he is immortalized in these photographs. In my favorite picture, we are posing in front of the Somali flag and underneath a banner that says, “Soomaliya Soomali baah leh.”
Somalia belongs to Somalis.
I lay claim to all that lays claim to me. My living and my dead and the dirt from their graves. My father’s childhood home. His schoolbooks and the sins of his youth. The grief that beats inside him like a second heart. I inherit the echo and the trace and the blue that binds us—the flag, the sky, the sea.
[post_title] => A Somali Archive of Our Own
[post_excerpt] => When memory in the aftermath of war meets nostalgia for a place and time that no longer exist.
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Why I think looksmaxxers have more in common with trans people than they'd like to admit.
“Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Allison.” This is a sentence I have fought to say, yet despite my warm intentions, occasionally, what the other person hears is an out of tune piano. Their confusion doesn’t typically last for more than a breath, but to me, that brief pause can feel like an eternity.
I don’t believe this apprehension is always derived from hate; as humans, we constantly look for boxes to put people in, to help us understand one another. Maybe that momentary hold is from the contrast between my feminine name and my “masculine” voice. Maybe it’s simply my own internal struggles. But on days where I am not busy questioning if my rights have been taken away yet, I have a peculiar thought: Are trans people the only ones who experience this introduction anxiety, or do cis people feel it, too?
In previous decades, there were aesthetic archetypes—such as the tomboy, the metrosexual, or even the neon-racoon-striped-hair scene kids—that bent the gender binary, allowing room for desperately needed gradients of self-expression. Each of these have lost their cultural tether over time. Twenty years ago, what made a man and what made a woman appeared to be looser. Today, the culturally dominant aesthetics are the “clean girl,” the “gym bro,” and “stealth wealth.” The diversity of self-expression has been snuffed out.
This cultural shift has taken place alongside American politics using trans existence as an attention-diverting scapegoat. The societal pressures and heightened scrutiny placed on trans bodies has had some unforeseen consequences: Cisgender people are now suffering from more rigid standards of gender, too. Women athletes are being subjected to invasive sex testing for not fitting what society deems “woman enough.” The WNBA is being targeted as a political hotbed of discourse centered around the league not having a clear enough definition of what a woman is, resulting in routine harassment both on the court and off of it. Heterosexual dating has increasingly been framed by influencers and “experts” alike as something transactional, asking how the man can provide and what the woman can offer in return.
Over the past several years, there has also been a rise in lifestyle content targeted towards men centered around hustle culture, exuberant wealth, and extreme fitness—broadly referred to as the “manosphere.”
Within this sphere of influence is the “looksmaxxing” community, a collective of individuals who have game-ified their appearance and, nonconsensually, the appearances of everyone else. Originally a cross-section of manosphere and incel (involuntary celibate) content, this collective of mostly men is fixated on making themselves as attractive as possible, as determined by what looksmaxxers deem to be a “mathematical” formula. Their scale ranges from zero to eight (“chud” to “chad”), but the online forums are very quick to tell you that an eight is almost impossible to achieve—only one in twelve billion will ever reach that score. Do these men fear being a 4.5, I wonder? When they say “nice to meet you,” do they worry that someone might notice their canthal tilt is slightly out of the ideal five-to-seven degree range?
I find a strange amount of empathy for these fears: I am always working towards having people perceive me how I see myself internally. The journey of self-actualization is not an easy one, but whether looksmaxxers want to admit it or not, it's also one that we share. Looksmaxxers message each other on forums asking where to get a reliable peptides dealer, or what methods they can use to ascend the scale. Trans women flock to forums to do much of the same, seeking advice on how to do their makeup, or tips for passing. Passing and ascending might as well be synonyms. To “pass” is the coveted goal for many of being perceived as a cisgender woman, to “ascend” is to get one step closer to becoming the ideal man. There is more in common between us than even I’d like to admit. (Maybe if they weren’t so hateful, we could even form a union one day.)
I struggle to share this empathy willingly, as the poster boy for this culture is a 20-year-old influencer named Braden Peters, who goes by the name “Clavicular.” Peters currently has over one million followers on TikTok, and was even profiled by TheNew York Times earlier this year, where he was referred to as a “social media sensation” and “a beacon for a group of narcissistic, status-obsessed young men.”
This profile feels especially frustrating, in part for the legitimacy it has afforded both Peters and the looksmaxxing movement. In it, he does not shy away from expressing his belief that he is above the law. (A belief underlined by an image he posted to Twitter/X stating “men’s facial features may sway criminal sentencing.”) There is even a subsection titled “No More Politics" where the reporter dives into Peters’ use of racial slurs, as well as all the time he has spent with self-proclaimed white supremacists and influencers charged with rape and human trafficking, including brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, arrested in Miami last July.
The looksmaxxing movement sits comfortably nestled under the manosphere umbrella alongside other hateful movements, such as blackpill and incel cultures. (In fact, many looksmaxxers often post using the same hashtags.) Like its sister movements, there is also a consistent pattern of violent escalation and dehumanization of anyone who doesn't fit within the system that looksmaxxers follow, ranging from cyberbullying to explicit forms of interpersonal physical violence.
This is, perhaps, the most crucial difference between transgender people and looksmaxxers. While arguably victims of the same cultural pressures, looksmaxxers are able—and choose—to identify with the aggressor. The most horrifying part to me in all of this is that Peters’ act of violence might not be a disqualifier for adoration, or continued participation in the most problematic aspects of the looksmaxxing movement. As looksmaxxing has unfortunately made its way into the cultural zeitgeist, I personally refuse to allow it to separate from its hateful, racist, misogynistic origins. But to create fundamental change, all of us must do the same: Peters’ case must be a wake up call to not de-sensitize ourselves to this movement, including the inevitable harm it has already caused, and the harm it will likely continue to cause if left unchecked.
Looksmaxxers’ relationship to gender expression and identity hasn’t ultimately protected them from judgement (and depending on how Clavicular’s case plays out, perhaps neither from consequence): The brutal scrutiny they’ve placed onto others has ended up reflected back toward themselves. Although most looksmaxxers are born male, society's expectations of men have gotten more extreme. Within manosphere culture, you must be fit, tall, and disciplined. So if you’re a short man who experiences joy, you might feel incongruent with your gender. Like many trans people, they, too, are experiencing a form of gender dysphoria, a psychiatric diagnosis that refers to the psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s perceived gender identity. Rather than an internalized journey, however, looksmaxxers continuously take in these negative external pressures and fire them back at each other—along with everyone else. Peters himself has stated that “men aren’t supposed to be happy.” The difference is that looksmaxxers believe others should suffer alongside them, and that often, they should ultimately suffer worse.
It's important to acknowledge that trans women are not immune to toxicity. There are niche corners of the culture centered around categorizing each other as “doll” or “brick,” which to some, simply translates as passing or not passing. Thankfully, this is not the dominating narrative for the trans community—it's actually the opposite: No matter where someone is on their self-actualization journey, whether day negative ten or day one hundred, our appearance doesn’t change that we are women. Anyone who says otherwise is rightfully shamed, quite the opposite approach to the one that looksmaxxers take, where it doesn’t matter how far on your looksmaxxing journey you are, god help you if you are 4.5 on their scale—or worse, a woman.
Still, the perpetual burden of incongruence isn’t something I’d wish on my worst enemy. We are all dolls, and deserve the grace of autonomy and self-expression. I hope looksmaxxers can also feel that warmth—from each other and themselves—soon. But to get there, they must first reckon with the collective trait at the root of their ugliness: hate. Because no matter how effective their peptides or hard the hammer hits their jawline, the only true path to their ascension to chad-hood might just depend on their finally embracing the opposite.
[post_title] => A Letter to the Chads from a Doll
[post_excerpt] => Why I think looksmaxxers have more in common with trans people than they'd like to admit.
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A day in the life of Misk and her Hello Kitty backpack at one of Gaza's makeshift schools.
Amid the ruins of destroyed buildings and the weathered tents that have become home for more than one million displaced people in Deir al-Balah’s camps, 11-year-old Misk walks alongside her classmates, carrying her Hello Kitty school bag. Along the way, she encounters just a few of the human realities of displacement: families searching for water and food; children carrying yellow plastic jerrycans as they take on daily responsibilities far beyond what they should or can.
But for Misk, this path represents the road to being a student again. She is feeling eager and excited. In her backpack, she carries a couple of things she had been without for some time: a notebook and a pen.
Since 2023, hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza have lost access to formal education amid the ongoing genocide and displacement of Palestinians. Israeli military operations have destroyed and continue to destroy many school buildings, while others have been converted into shelters for displaced families. Temporary learning spaces began popping up in early 2025 as teachers and volunteers transformed displacement tents into classrooms, adding desks, chairs, and blackboards so children could return to learning despite the ongoing violence. These spaces have offered more than a place to study: They have given children a chance to regain a part of their daily routines, a community of peers, and something resembling the normal life they'd lost.
Misk was in the third grade in May 2024 when Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued evacuation orders—paper slips that were airdropped over entire neighborhoods ordering people to vacate their homes and leave town. In southern Gaza, her city of Rafah welcomed over a million displaced residents overnight, while Misk and her family ended up in the center of the Gaza Strip at Deir al-Balah, where they still share a single small room in her relative's house—a room where they all sleep, eat, study, and work, in circumstances that have changed nearly every part of their daily lives. Amidst all this, Misk’s new school at the Deir al-Balah displacement camp, while temporary, has become a refuge.
On a recent September day, Misk sits with eight other children inside a small room. There is no school gate, no morning assembly, and no bell marking the beginning or end of their lesson. Yet children still arrive at 9 a.m., with whatever basic supplies they can find. Some carry old notebooks or loose papers, and the few pens they have. They sit at simple wooden desks facing the board, enthusiastically raising their hands as their teachers—sisters Jumanah, 24, and Shahd Al-Naouq, 22—guide them through lessons in Arabic, English, and mathematics. The scene resembles an ordinary classroom, where children listen, answer questions, and learn together. But instead of concrete walls and a permanent building, their class takes place in a single tent inside a displacement camp.
This one-room school did not start from big plans or with help from a fully-funded institution. It started with a question. Last year, Jumanah was an ambitious university graduate with an accounting degree preparing to begin her career. But the war had changed that path. Job opportunities were scarce and starting a career in accounting seemed increasingly out of reach as she was forced to navigate the daily challenges of an uncertain future.
Then, earlier this year, Jumanah visited a friend whose relatives were hosting a displaced family. There, she noticed a young girl drawing. She could not stay focused for long. Every so often, the girl’s mother would ask her to help wash clothes by hand or with other chores, and she would get up. After finishing, she would return to her pen and paper and continue drawing.
“When I saw Misk trying to draw despite everything happening around her, I thought we needed to do something,” Jumanah tells me. “I felt that children had not only lost their schools; they had lost a part of their daily lives.”
She thought about the children living in the area and in the nearby displacement camps, probably tens of thousands of them, who were growing up without education or a place to return to after losing their homes. Then came her question: If children could no longer safely reach their school due to displacement, long distances, and Israeli bombardments, what if their school came to them?
Her sister, Shahd, agreed to be a part of it.
“We did not have a school or big resources, but we had children who wanted to learn. I said, ‘Let’s start with what we have.’ Even if the place is simple, the important thing is that they have a place to come back to,” Shahd says.
When they first opened the school, Jumanah welcomed their students inside their Deir al-Balah home, a small structure made of corrugated metal. She put a single table in a room and bought a small chalk and marker board. Shahd, an English literature student at the Islamic University of Gaza, joined her, and together the sisters spoke to their neighbors and asked for small donations to help pay for the necessary supplies. Before long, children from the neighborhood and the nearby camps came. Misk was among the first to join.
At that point, there were no more than ten students from six to 12 years old. Jumanah took on most of the responsibility for organizing the space and putting together lessons on basic Arabic, math, and other topics. Shahd, meanwhile, taught the children letters and numbers in English.
At first, their goal was not to complete a full school year or make up for everything the children had lost during the past three years of war. “The most important thing for us was to make children connected to learning and make them feel that there was still a place waiting for them every day,” Jumanah says.
As more families learned about the school, more children began attending. Within four months, Jumanah and Shahd were able to move to a newly designated area in their neighborhood, where not one but three rows of tents were set up as classrooms, allowing them to welcome even more children. They have since been joined by additional teachers, who also volunteer their time to teach the students.
A few simple wooden desks and learning materials were added, including notebooks, textbooks, pens, and another blackboard. Children sat in rows next to one another, with the chalkboard at one end, like a traditional classroom. It became known as the Al-Itqan (Excellence) School.
Al-Itqan has provided a refuge for children, but it is not separate from the reality of the camp—it is at its heart. Daily life continues outside its main entrance, as people push water carts between the tents, walking back and forth as they try to secure their basic needs. The children, too, also carry different stories with them—stories of the years they've lived without access to education.
For Misk, returning to the classroom has meant more than just the opportunity to sit in front of a book or complete an exercise. It has also been a chance to be with other children who have lived through the same experience. It has meant she can finally build new friendships; that once again, she can belong.
“I was happy,” Misk says about the chance to return to school again. “I felt like I was living the way I used to. I had a place to go, meet other children, and learn again.”
The school has offered something similar to other children, too, while still presenting challenges shaped by the realities of life in the camp. There is a twelve-year-old, Farah Al-Harazin, who always sits in the front, not because she chooses to, but because she needs to be close enough to see what’s written on the board. Due to limited access to medical care, she hasn't yet been able to get treatment for her weak eyesight. Still, Farah is now in a space that understands her needs and has allowed her to participate with the other children.
“I asked Aseel, ‘Where is Yousef? Why hasn’t he come for a few days?’" Shahd says. That's when Shahd learned that every morning he had to fetch water for his family living in the camp.
There is also Issa, who always comes to the classroom with an empty pot inside his backpack. The pot is his way of providing food for his family: Classes begin at 9 a.m., but every day, Issa leaves to the community kitchen (takiya) to fill the pot with whatever food is available at 10 a.m. He then brings the pot home before returning to class.
Among the children is also Ahmad Nasrallah, who lives with a kidney condition, making everyday life especially difficult. The stifling heat, poor ventilation, and lack of electricity in the classroom made the space feel exhausting and suffocating for him. During lessons, Ahmad often struggles to breathe and finds it difficult to concentrate.
Earlier this year, Jumanah tried to move him to a better spot, where some air could reach him without him having to walk out of the classroom. “Sometimes I felt that I was not only their teacher," Jumanah tells me. "I felt like I was a mother to them. Every child has their own circumstances.”
What the sisters-turned-teachers have witnessed in their students are not isolated cases, happening only in Al-Itqan. According to the United Nations and education organizations like Save the Children, there are around 700,000 children aged four to 17 who have missed nearly three academic years of in-person learning, while around 93% of schools in Gaza require major repairs or reconstruction.
But these numbers do not show the small ways that conflict and dispossession continue to shape the lives of children.
Three years ago, before the war, Misk’s Hello Kitty backpack was simply part of her daily journey to school. After losing her family home, she used it to carry the few clothes and personal belongings she could take with her. Today, she walks between the tents with the same backpack, carrying a notebook, a pen, and a bottle of water. The makeshift school that started with eight children has grown, too, and now welcomes nearly 100 students across its three tent classrooms.
After more than two years away from her old school, Misk now attends classes every day, with friends her own age.
Amidst so much, it's like she is living part of her childhood again.
[post_title] => The Things Children Carry
[post_excerpt] => A day in the life of Misk and her Hello Kitty backpack at one of Gaza's makeshift schools.
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Why you should pay attention to Indiana's Public Question 1 this election.
For 175 years, bail has been a constitutional right for everyone in Indiana awaiting trial, with the exception of anyone charged with murder or treason. The same system is used in most of the country, allowing defendants to live outside of jail while awaiting trial for a crime. It’s imperfect and favors the wealthy, but at its best, bail is meant to balance a person’s liberty—until and unless proven guilty—with the safety of the broader community.
On the Indiana ballot this November, Public Question 1 asks Hoosiers to amend the state’s constitution to narrow that right. If the amendment passes, anyone charged with any crime in the state could be denied bail if “the proof is evident or the presumption strong and the state proves by clear and convincing evidence that no release conditions will reasonably protect the safety of any other person or the community.”
Proponents of the measure, which first had to pass the state legislature, cite public safety concerns. They claim that people who are released from jail on bail too often go on to commit dangerous crimes.
On the other hand, opponents are concerned about preemptively taking away defendants’ liberty, the vague and broad language of the amendment, and the potential for biases in and out of the courtroom.
A High-Risk Proposal for Rare Offenses
Under the current bail system, even if someone is ultimately released on bail, it can take many days for them to be able to walk out. The new amendment would make it easier to hold people in jail while they wait for hearings and other procedures.
“It is a significant disruption on the life of that person if they're being held in custody,” says Ray Casanova, the chief public defender for Marion County, where Indianapolis is located. “I do think [the measure] is going to have a disproportionate impact on low-income folks.”
People held in jail can lose their jobs, potentially resulting in other losses, including housing and custody rights to their children. In jail, they may also not have access to essential medications. All before they have been found guilty of a crime.
Vicki Becker, a prosecutor in northern Indiana’s Elkhart County, told Indiana Capital Chronicle that the amendment was introduced because “so many individuals…were back out in the community without any accountability whatsoever and continuing to commit offenses against other people,” adding that, “it just did not sit well with prosecutors who are much more focused on protecting public safety.”
Others question whether the amendment is really needed to protect communities, including State Senator Rodney Pol, a Democrat from the northwestern corner of the state. “If you can demonstrate that [the accused] are unsafe, there are already avenues” to mitigate that risk, he says.
For example, in many counties, judges have the latitude to set bail high enough so that a defendant will not be able to pay it. Casanova also points to measures such as GPS monitoring, no-contact orders, and situations when bail can be revoked. “Is this provision really providing additional safety or is it just essentially removing a constitutional right?” asks Casanova.
Data shows it’s rare for people released on bail to commit violent crimes while awaiting trial—1.4% of high risk people released before their trial have done so, according to ACLU analysis of data from the Indiana Office of Court Service. Rates of new crimes were even smaller for those deemed moderate and low risk.
When those violent crimes do happen, “it’s a tragedy,” says Zach Stock, who works for the Indiana Public Defender’s Council as a legislative counsel. “It's just natural human nature to say, ‘Gosh, we had that guy confined. And had he remained confined, that wouldn't have happened.’”
“But that’s assuming that we have more power than we do. It's really hard to predict the future,” Stock says, which is what prosecutors are ultimately attempting to do when they try to prove to a judge that a person poses a risk of harm.
Unless you detain everyone, some people who are released ahead of their trial are going to commit a crime. Making those numbers as small as possible “does come down to improving our ability to predict the future,” says Stock.
A Precursor to Losing More Rights
For State Senator Pol, the amendment lays the ground for the abuse of other rights, like the right to protest or to unionize. Someone could be accused of being a violent protester, for example, and be held without bail, only to end up with a lesser charge of disorderly conduct. “Now I lost a year of my life for disorderly conduct, you know, because I was out at a protest,” Pol says.
Levi Gonzalez, a policy associate at The Bail Project, an advocacy and bail assistance nonprofit, echoed those concerns. He says such proposals are also not just limited to Indiana. In other states across the country, more laws are “looking to ultimately deprive people of their liberty at a moment where there's also a lot of political tension and upheaval,” he says. Given what he refers to as a “creeping authoritarianism” in the country, there could be political pressure “to make an example out of people“ arrested at a protest or demonstration.
The broad nature of Indiana’s ballot measure makes those concerns possible. It's different from the “tough on crime” eras in the 1980s and 1990s when change in the criminal justice system was incremental. “Now it's like, let's just go for everything,” says Gonzalez. This worries him.
Other states, like Tennessee and Alabama, are also broadening the scope of crimes for which people can be held without bail. But other states usually list specific new offenses that will be ineligible for bail. They don’t usually make it as broad as Indiana has, where, “any person who gets arrested for any offense now could potentially be at risk of being detained” without bail, says Gonzalez.
The wide scope of Indiana’s amendment means it doesn't necessarily only affect marginalized communities like the state’s Black and Latino residents, who make up around 18% of the state’s total population, says Gonzalez. “But of course, they're always going to be the ones that are going to face the brunt of this because those communities are ultimately going to be the ones that are going to come in contact with law enforcement more often.“
Protections Vulnerable Under Companion Bill
Should the amendment be approved by voters this November, another related bill passed by the state legislature earlier this year would also take effect.
The companion bill, as it’s called, would provide some protections to people facing charges and pretrial detention. It is “kind of a bright spot in what looks like an otherwise hopelessly contentious political landscape,” says Stock of the collaboration among his agency, prosecutors, judges, and legislators to create the bill.
The bill specifies a 48-hour time limit before a detention hearing and a person’s right to appeal a decision. It asks the state to meet a higher burden of proof, “because we are talking about taking away liberty before proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” says Stock. Judges will also have to document why they're making their decisions.
But because these protections aren’t in the amendment itself, they could easily be overturned by another legislative bill. Changes to the amendment, on the other hand, would require it to pass the legislature in two different sessions and then receive another ballot vote approval. “It's good to ultimately have that companion bill to provide that due process, but it's a lot better when it's enshrined in the actual constitutional language,” says Gonzalez.
Senator Pol is one of the legislators who worked on the companion bill and says it makes the amendment a little bit more palatable with the safeguards for the accused that it puts in place. “But I still don't think it goes far enough, and I still think that it is a dangerous precedent that's being set.”
While Senator Pol did vote to pass the amendment on the Senate floor, he says, “I’m still not a fan of it, and I'm still not going to vote for it on the ballot.”
[post_title] => Bail On the Ballot
[post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to Indiana's Public Question 1 this election.
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Why you should pay attention to Alabama's Statewide Amendment 3 this election.
On the ballot in Alabama this November is a proposed constitutional amendment to policies on prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance in public K–12 schools.
Statewide Amendment 3 would compel local school boards to adopt rules requiring the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of each school day and allow student-initiated and student-led prayer. However, the amendment would not require students to participate in either the Pledge or prayer. If passed, students would have the right to opt out based on their beliefs and would be allowed to leave the classroom during either.
On February 5, 2026, the U.S. Department of Education issued updated Guidance on Constitutionally Protected Prayer and Religious Expression in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools, replacing previous guidelines from 2023. The update states that students, teachers, and school employees retain their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression, which includes engaging in personal, visible prayer. Although the United States Supreme Court previously determined that public schools and their employees (including teachers, coaches, and principals) cannot lead, organize, prescribe, or endorse prayer or religious exercises during school activities, Alabama has leaned into the Department of Education’s newest recommendations, which have created a voluntary religious expression loophole.
Back in May, the Alabama legislature approved the proposed amendment by attempting to explicitly enshrine student-led prayer into their state constitution to shield it from future legal challenges. Since April, Alabama law has required public K-12 schools to conduct the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of each school day. Additionally, students are permitted to “pray or engage in religious activities or religious expression before, during, and after the school day.”
The bill was introduced by Republican State Representative Reed Ingram, who says the United States was founded on Christian principles. He also says that today, there are families who don’t have time to implement faith-based activities, like prayer at home, because they are too busy working. (Though he notes he doesn’t personally know a family struggling with this.)
Both Republicans and Democrats in the Alabama House of Representatives and Senate have expressed support for the proposal.
“This is an opportunity, not mandatory; it's a voluntary basis, student-led only,” Ingram explains. “Nothing is going over the PA, and it’s nothing that’s going to be led by a teacher or principal. The student only prays if they stand up and tell the teacher they want to pray this morning, and the class will have that option.”
Ingham adds that student-led prayer can be led by students of all religions and faiths, not limited to just Christianity, but that’s not clearly written into the bill.
Following the 2024 presidential election, Baptist News Global reported that the conservative thinktank, the Heritage Foundation, does not propose a mandatory federal school prayer program. However, its conservative framework aligns with efforts like this one to expand and protect individual religious expression in public schools. (The Heritage Foundation wrote the infamous Project 2025, a conservative blueprint to transform the federal government and social structures of the country at large.)
Other people of fath, including Christians, are against implementing this type of bill into state law, like Rev. Julie Conrady, Minister at Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa. She says that this kind of amendment imposes or forces a religion onto individuals who may not believe in the faith being practiced during student-led prayer.
“Alabama has plenty of churches. If folks are not getting what they need on Sunday morning, Wednesday night, and all the other opportunities they have for religious freedom and expression during the week, then they need to choose a different school for their children,” Conrady says. “Because Alabama public schools should remain available for every student to be themselves, without being coerced to subjective practices, including this bill.”
About 25% of Alabamians do not identify with Christianity, according to a Pew Research report from 2025. Conrady says this amendment dismisses that figure.
“The Universalist Church is included in the fourth of [Alabamians of other faiths], which also includes Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, nones, and the atheist, and the humanist,” she says.
The minister adds she’s been talking with other religious leaders who oppose this type of bill in other red states, and they are planning to take action up to the Supreme Court if the bill passes in November.
“There will never be a separation between church and state,” says Zareen Dodwad-Khan, 46, who lives in Leeds, Alabama. Khan is Muslim and has three kids in public schools. “If the majority of people want prayer in school, I’m not gonna fight it and say I'm totally against it, because I’m a minority. And I teach my kids about their religion and identity at home.”
However, Khan also says she will likely vote “no” for the amendment in November.
“I’m a Christian, who believes in Jesus Christ. We pray every night before dinner. It’s like church, politics, and school have all been mashed together and rolled into one. Instead of the way it was intended to be, which is all separate things and separate parts of our lives, they’re trying to make it all part of the same,” she says. “As a parent and a Chrisitian, I think that’s very concerning, and even for people who don’t believe the same way I do.”
Alabama voters will decide if they agree on November 3, 2026.
[post_title] => "There Will Never Be a Separation of Church and State"
[post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to Alabama's Statewide Amendment 3 this election.
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