Every essay we've published, ordered by the editor — for return rather than for scrolling. Filter by topic, sort by length, find the piece you half-remember.
Downtown Beirut was not simply rebuilt badly after the war. It was rebuilt in a way that made later crises harder to absorb: vacancy became rational, repair became optional, ownership became distant, and the symbolic center of the capital lost the ordinary citizens who make cities heal.
Read essay ->Lebanon can defend its land without pretending Hezbollah is innocent, and reject Hezbollah's permanent exception without pretending its rivals have built a real state.
A wartime cry to Fatima opens a deeper Lebanese pattern: the religions are different, but the land keeps giving grief a feminine witness.
A generator in a basement explains the country: every missing public service becomes a private sovereignty, every private sovereignty defends the failure that made it necessary, and every household becomes its own small state.
The Abu Ali Itani generator incident showed Lebanon's political system in miniature: every missing public service becomes someone's private kingdom, and when the state finally arrives, it is read as faction before law.
A census would force Lebanon to decide whether the diaspora, refugees, sects, and citizens belong to one political reality or several convenient fictions.
From Resolution 1701 to IMF reform language, Lebanon supplies flags, signatures, and communiques for agreements that rarely travel downward into authority.
A buffer made of emptied villages can move the line of danger, but it also turns houses, orchards, roads, and schools into evidence for the next war.
Municipal fragmentation, sectarian courts, village registration, waste politics, and personal-status law turn daily life into a geography lesson in distrust.
Solidere's downtown offers the cleanest version of Lebanon's postwar bargain: privatize the wound, financialize the repair, and call the absence of public life reconstruction.
Beirut does not need another place to move through. Beirut needs a place to stay.
