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August 2022

With translations by Fatima Kassem Moussa الدنيا قايمة والشعب غافل / راحت بلادكم ما حد سائل   The world is in uproar and the people oblivious / Your land is lost and no one notices -Omar el-Zeenni, "Al-Dunya 'Aymi"((For el-Zeenni's poetry and songs throughout this essay, I used the book el-Zeenni el-Saghir, Omar el-Zeenni, Molière al-Sharq. (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 2010).))    In 1918, Omar el-Zeenni looked around him and declared "The world is madness". Indeed, by the end of the First World War, el-Zeenni's world was turning upside down. The wider political world that el-Zeenni and past generations of his ancestors had belonged to, the Ottoman

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Critical Essay, Non-Fiction
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I. BURNING BANKNOTES In Tunisia, there are two common ways to destroy a banknote: burning or grinding. Burning was the old way the dinar banknotes were destroyed. It was a multi-step process. First, you had to determine which banknote was going to be burned. Then, you had to separate these banknotes from the rest of the bills. For example, when private banks bring the cash they have in extra to the Central Bank, each damaged banknote is identified and put aside. Some are only slightly ripped. They just need a little tape here and there so that they can be sent

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Non-Fiction, Visual Essay
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"Cats of Beirut" by Tanya Traboulsi Lessons from Beirut's Cats and the People Who Care for Them I have lived on Makdissi Street in Beirut since I was born. When I was around 14-years-old, I fell into the habit of taking long solitary walks around the city. The traffic-dense roads and crowded streets were a distraction from the thoughts that filled my head and the worries that dominated my small world: not fitting in at school, a bad grade, falling-out with a friend.  Over the past few years, having participated in an

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Non-Fiction
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X-ray courtesy of Dr. Bassam Osman. More than 30 pellets inside of a 20-year-old man, shot by security forces at close range in Martyr's Square on August 8, 2020, four days after the Port of Beirut explosion. Do you remember the mock gallows with man-sized cutouts of Lebanese politicians hanging from them? Remember how you had never seen anything like that before? Remember how it made you feel?   *   The Lebanese government has left its people for dead. The finale of thirty years of corruption and negligence and crippling theft played on fast-forward over the past three years. When people

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Non-Fiction, prose
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