Social Activism

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Where Were the Gatekeepers?

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  At 6:06 in the evening on August 4, 2020, I was in my office, streaming a stand-up special while I worked through some financial paperwork. An unremarkable afternoon, the kind Beirut teaches you to treasure precisely because nothing is happening in it. Then the room shook. First like an earthquake. Then harder, until the walls themselves were drumming. I heard what sounded like aircraft. In Lebanon, that sound has never meant panic; we grow up hearing jets break the sound barrier over our heads, and we learn, the way you learn anything you cannot control, to keep working through it. That is what pacification actually feels like from the inside: a sound that should stop your heart, filed instead under background noise. This one did not stay background noise for long. I ran to the window and saw a white cloud rising over the port. Before I could work out what it was, I heard the real sound. The second one. I watched a shape climb into the sky that some part of me recognized be...
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History of Victorian England

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  In late Victorian London, poverty was so widespread that even sleep came at a cost. One of the cheapest forms of shelter for the homeless was the "four-penny coffin," a wooden box where a person could lie down for the night, often covered with nothing more than a tarpaulin. For those who couldn't afford even that, a two-penny alternative existed: a bench and a rope stretched across the chest to keep a person upright as they slept. This grim arrangement came to be known as the "two-penny hangover"—a haunting image of hardship and endurance in a time when survival itself was a nightly struggle. Despite popular belief, the term "hangover" did not originate from this rope-sleeping practice. While it makes for a compelling tale, linguistic research shows that the word originally referred to the lingering effects of something left unfinished-such as unresolved business from a meeting. It wasn't until the early 20th century, around 1904, that "hang...
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Why I Write About Institutions

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I was born on a Wednesday in July 1981, in Saint Joseph Hospital, a short drive from the shelter where I would spend much of my childhood. On paper, Lebanon's civil war was six years old that summer. Growing up, I learned it had been rehearsing its provocations long before its official date. My family likes to say I was born in a shelter. It is a metaphor, but only barely. The first nine years of my life kept making it true. The shelter was the minus-one of my grandparents' building: a warehouse of perhaps two hundred square meters, cleaned out and claimed by the families above it. It had two entries, one from the parking, and one from the lobby, where you stepped over a concrete lip and climbed down a ladder someone had built by hand. We strung electric lamps against the dark. When the battles intensified, bread could vanish for weeks at a time. During the worst sieges, it reached us only rationed, passed down through the militias that held the area. My grandmother Teta Victo...
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