Greetings from Texas
America, the first postcolonial nation, is made of squares. It’s among the angular continents, with fake borders, straight lines, someone else’s perfect shapes. And every postcolonial state from Kenya to Kansas must question: what is our culture? We have a name, a group of people, some lines on
Greetings from Depoe Bay
To my retroactive dismay, I believe I’ve had a nihilistic summer. With what felt like endless time spent languishing in my own solitude, spinning out over the impossible quagmires of love, career, and selfhood, I managed to whittle my beliefs to a single point. The Answer, if you will. The intangi
Greetings from Cairo
After about a week in Cairo, my host, and by that point friend, Walid, asked me if the city matched my expectations. ‘It’s hard to say,’ I replied. ‘I didn’t really have a clear picture in my head before I arrived.’ Yes, I had skimmed through a travel book and looked a few things up, [&h
Greetings from Cotonou, Benin
Editor’s Note: the author has used a number of French words throughout the text. These are denoted by an asterisk, which corresponds to an explanatory footnote at the bottom of the page. Like all language students, I began my second year at Oxford by attending an informational sessio
Coquettes-who-read vs deepfakes
I failed my interview for journalism school. In my application, I had written about my passion for telling human stories—the kind that give depth to reality through narrative. And so, they asked me: “Pitch a human story on the AI Summit” (nothing ironic about that). I panicked and gave

