What We Are Reading Today: ‘Relics of War’ by Jennifer Raab

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Updated 11 September 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Relics of War’ by Jennifer Raab

In 1865, Clara Barton traveled to the site of the notorious Confederate prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia, where she endeavored to name the missing and the dead.

The future founder of the American Red Cross also collected their relics—whittled spoons, woven reed plates, a piece from the prison’s “dead line,” a tattered Bible—and brought them back to her Missing Soldiers Office in Washington, DC, presenting them to politicians, journalists, and veterans’ families before having them photographed together in an altar-like arrangement. 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Intraterrestrials’ by Karen G. Lloyd

Updated 25 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Intraterrestrials’ by Karen G. Lloyd

Life thrives in the deepest, darkest recesses of Earth’s crust—from methane seeps in the ocean floor to the highest reaches of Arctic permafrost—and it is unlike anything seen on the surface.

“Intraterrestrials” shares what scientists are learning about these strange types of microbial life—and how research expeditions to some of the most extreme locales on the planet are broadening our understanding of what life is and how its earliest forms may have evolved.

Karen Lloyd takes readers on an adventure from the bottom of the ocean through the jungles of Central America to the high-altitude volcanoes of the Andes.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Designing San Francisco’ by Alison Isenberg

Updated 24 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Designing San Francisco’ by Alison Isenberg

“Designing San Francisco” is the untold story of the formative postwar decades when US cities took their modern shape amid clashing visions of the future.

In this pathbreaking and richly illustrated book, Alison Isenberg shifts the focus from architects and city planners—those most often hailed in histories of urban development and design—to the unsung artists, activists, and others who played pivotal roles in rebuilding San Francisco between the 1940s and the 1970s.


What We Are Reading Today: Supply Chain Justice by Mary Bosworth

Updated 23 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Supply Chain Justice by Mary Bosworth

In the UK’s fully outsourced “immigration detainee escorting system,” private sector security employees detain, circulate and deport foreign national citizens. Run and organized like a supply chain, this system dehumanizes those who are detained and deported, treating them as if they were packages to be moved from place to place and relying on poorly paid, minimally trained staff to do so. In “Supply Chain Justice,” Mary Bosworth offers the first empirically grounded, scholarly analysis of the British detention and deportation system. Drawing on four years of extensive ethnographic research, Bosworth examines what keeps the system in place and whether it might be effectively challenged.
Told by a senior manager that “this is a logistics business,” Bosworth documents how the public and private sectors have built a supply chain in which people’s humanity is transformed both symbolically and tangibly through administrative processes and bureaucracy into monetized, measurable units.
Like all logistics, the system has failure built into it.


Book Review: ‘America’s View of the East, Cinematically’ by Abdulmohsen Al-Mutairi

Updated 22 May 2025
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Book Review: ‘America’s View of the East, Cinematically’ by Abdulmohsen Al-Mutairi

Saudi journalist, filmmaker and cultural commentator Abdulmohsen Al-Mutairi launched his long-anticipated book — “America’s View of the East, Cinematically” — at last month’s Saudi Film Festival.

Cementing his reputation as a vital voice at the intersection of cinema and Arab identity, the book is a natural progression from his award-winning documentary, “Memories From The North,” tackling Western portrayals of the East with the same precision, intellect and emotional clarity.

Al-Mutairi drew wide attention for his documentary, which offered a poetic look at the Gulf War of 1990-91 and was named best short documentary at the 2022 festival.

“The documentary looks to me like a chapter in a book, because both memories and the war look like chapters to us. To me, the war is a timeline, there is a beginning, middle and an end,” Al-Mutairi told Arab News at the time.

“America’s View of the East, Cinematically” continues that mission, serving as both critique and chronicle of how Arab and Eastern identities have long been distorted by the cinematic lens of the West.

“This encyclopedia will be a building block added to what the Saudi Film Festival has started since its launch in 2008 and an effective tributary in the path of Saudi cinema, reinforcing what the festival organizers believe in and what they seek to achieve by emphasizing that the film industry must be accompanied by a knowledge industry directed at those working in the local and Arab cinema field,” according to its introduction.

More than critique, the book offers a kind of cinematic reclamation.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Book of Alchemy’ by Suleika Jaouad

Updated 22 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Book of Alchemy’ by Suleika Jaouad

In “The Book of Alchemy,” Suleika Jaouad explores the art of journaling and shares everything she’s learned about how this life-altering practice can help us tap into that mystical trait that exists in every human: creativity. She has gathered wisdom from one hundred writers, artists, and thinkers in the form of essays and writing prompts. Their insights invite us to inhabit a more inspired life.