This week's selection of essays spans questions of identity, artistic integrity, institutional discrimination, and the global consequences of technological ambition.
Dana El Kurd, a Palestinian writer and academic, has published a reflective essay examining different forms of silence following the discovery that she has a Jewish Israeli great-grandmother. The piece grapples with the discomfort of unexpected family connections during a moment of profound geopolitical crisis. El Kurd describes the cascade of difficult questions that emerged from this revelation—whether she lost relatives in the Holocaust, whether any survivors settled in Israel, what roles they may have played in the military, and what violence they might have committed. She acknowledges that she does not currently wish to know the answers to these questions, particularly as she witnesses what she describes as genocide unfolding. Her great-grandmother's descendants, she notes, have kept their Israeli identities concealed, suggesting they too maintain their own protective silences around the matter.
Beyond the personal dimension, El Kurd's essay addresses broader philosophical questions that Palestinians confront in their struggle for self-determination. She asks how her grandfather, a devout Palestinian man, reconciled himself with having an Israeli mother, and what such reconciliation might suggest about the possibility of coexistence. She wonders whether Israeli society, shaped by ethnonationalism, can be reformed, and poses the fundamental challenge: what do you do when your colonizer has no homeland to which they can return?
Cinema and Mythmaking
Iza Ding has written for the London Review of Books blog about Wen Muye's film Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, comparing it to Hollywood's approach to depicting American military interventions. Chinese state media has promoted the film as a new kind of anti-war cinema, drawing parallels to All Quiet on the Western Front and Schindler's List. The film's critique of American military action is direct and unsparing, featuring dialogue such as "You Americans think everyone is a terrorist." Yet individual American characters receive humanisation within the narrative. Tony Wang, a Chinese American soldier from California played by Aarif Lee, initially presents as tough but eventually reveals vulnerability, expressing only a desire to return home after drinking whiskey.
The film's portrayal of Iraqi characters evolves throughout the narrative. They begin as innocent victims but gradually reveal how ordinary, decent people can be bent toward extremism by unbearable circumstances. This moral complexity is characteristic of Wen Muye's directorial approach. The film establishes a clear moral hierarchy—the Chinese characters function as the good guys—but resists simple villainy. Americans are depicted as homesick and frightened; Iraqis are shown as grieving and enraged. This structure creates a different kind of interventionist mythmaking than typical American war cinema produces.
John WM Thompson has examined Mike Flanagan's adaptation of Carrie in relation to broader trends in horror storytelling and what he identifies as the "cosy horror" that has begun appearing in video games. Thompson argues that in America, market forces rather than audiences drive resistance to tragic narratives. Tragic storytelling, he contends, resists the linear franchising, four-quadrant reboots, and toy merchandising that define contemporary entertainment strategy. While ordinary people might appreciate and embrace tragic narratives if given the opportunity—just as few people want to eat candy constantly—the market consistently offers only comedy and optimism.
Thompson suggests this creates a self-reinforcing cycle. If audiences encounter only comedic and optimistic art, they come to expect only such content. When told that art must make them feel good and reflect an optimistic world, people become confused and dismayed when offered sour, bitter, or complex material. They may actively seek to escape tragedy. The consequence, Thompson argues, is that depictions of complexity, complication, and reality at its least friendly become feared and reviled. By Flanagan's own account, Carrie participates in this broader action of sanitising horror.
Healthcare, Dignity and the Right to Ordinariness
NHS England has implemented a ban on trans women accessing female-only hospital wards, a policy decision that represents what critics describe as institutional cruelty. The ban will make healthcare access more difficult for trans people while simultaneously increasing pressure on facilities already struggling with space and resource constraints. Ash Lazarus Orr, a writer and the named plaintiff in a federal lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's passport policy for trans people, has published an essay titled "Why Trans People Deserve to Be Boring" in response to this and similar institutional actions.
Orr's essay addresses the exhausting burden placed on marginalised people to perform their oppression in ways that generate sympathy and empathy. Marginalised people are often easiest to defend when they are sympathetic, Orr argues, yet this creates a deeply unfair requirement: that someone must be likeable before being deemed worthy of dignity. The trans person whose story is supposed to change minds faces impossible calculations—vulnerable enough to create empathy but composed enough to remain credible, angry enough that harm feels real but not so angry that listeners disengage.
Orr describes years spent preparing for interviews and considering how statements would land with audiences, becoming intimately familiar with these strategic calculations. While sometimes necessary, such calculations are exhausting when one recognises the freedom available to cisgender people to be ordinary without their individual behaviour being treated as meaningful evidence about cisgender people as a population. A cisgender person can be an asshole without anyone treating their behaviour as revealing something fundamental about whether cisgender people deserve to exist comfortably in the world. Trans people, Orr argues, deserve identical freedom—to be mediocre, annoying, wrong, or unlikeable without their individual failures being weaponised as evidence about whether people like them deserve dignity and comfortable existence.
The Human Cost of AI Expansion
Arundhati Roy has written an extended essay for Equator examining the North American tech billionaire class, generative AI, and the particular ramifications for Indian workers. Roy's piece covers substantial ground while maintaining sharp rhetorical force, examining self-serving industry calls for regulation and the material consequences of AI development for workers in poor countries.
Roy references Karen Hao's book Empire of AI, which documents the ongoing plunder of land and resources alongside the recruitment of workers in poor countries into "data capturer" roles at starvation wages. These workers sustain the ambitions of what Roy calls the "Cyclopes" of the tech industry. The energy demands of massive supercomputers and data centres are so substantial that companies are aggressively lobbying for private nuclear plants and the rollback of safety protocols. Billions of dollars are being invested in developing nonperishable fusion energy sources, with the stated goal of relocating data centres into outer space or onto the moon.
Meanwhile, on Earth, the Indian government has welcomed the establishment of additional energy-intensive data centres. Six are planned for Visakhapatnam alone, including a $15 billion hub for Google. These projects are receiving clearance with virtually zero environmental oversight, treated as though they were ordinary warehouses rather than infrastructure with profound ecological consequences. Roy identifies this as part of a longstanding pattern between India and the United States: the transfer of garbage, toxic industries, and poisoned enterprises from the Global North to the Global South, framed as mutual benefit. Indian activists, like their American counterparts, are putting their bodies on the line to prevent the poisoning of water and air for tens of thousands of people living near the proposed data centre sites.
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