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Larry the cat
Dave the Rave has all the moves. Verily, is he the Lord of the Dance. Yet no one or their cat noticed the sky turning black upon his return. Only I saw the devil on his back as he leads us towards post-Brexit temptation.  But something is afoot. Mark my words. These tea-guzzling-biscuit-gobbling Fat Cats…
Two Poems by Shahalam Tariq
Iqbal's Dream The mosque in Cordoba stands symmetrical, linear — like the progression of History in the Imam's khutba on Friday. The dreamlike Spain glorious still home to the righteous pours out of his dream and the ink flows onto the page placed on the desk (….) The unleveled still broken road gaping at every…
A Quiet Epic of Absence
"I am cold and I think / I will never feel warm again." — Forugh Farrokhzad's poem Another Birth (Tavalodi Digar, 1964). Premiered in Competition this Fall at the 30th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), Isabelle Kalandar's debut feature Another Birth marked the arrival of a filmmaker whose vision is at once intimate and elemental.…
The Genius of Bacha Khan
Most geniuses have one masterwork for which they are famous.  For Che and Fidel, that work was surely the Cuban Revolution and its international humanism, just as it was for Lenin, the Russian.  For CLR James, we can list "The Black Jacobins” as an extraordinary work of genius, as well as the underground Marxist group…
Versailles in Gaza
“The Versailles settlement did not so much end the war as prolong it by other means.” — Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and  Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2001), p. 493. On September 29 2025, Donald Trump stood beside Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office, a map…