Beirut
Remembering the Beirut Explosion
During the 2020 Beirut port blast, everyone in the city with a camera phone and social media account became a reporter of some sort, and the catastrophe opened the door to a new way of experiencing history. What the algorithm reshared became instant archival material that still has an important story to tell.
Reading Beirut's Walls
A personal walk through five neighborhoods of the Lebanese capital becomes a way of reading the country's collapse. Returning after years away, the writer traces a single line from Ain al-Mreisseh up to Hamra, over to Verdun and Downtown, and across the old green line to Gemmayzeh.
Israel Called Its Beirut Strikes Precise. We Reconstructed Five of Them
New Lines examined five Israeli airstrikes in and around Beirut, each presented as a targeted operation against a specific individual. The investigation maps a spectrum of destruction — from one man killed while his family survived to two residential buildings reduced to rubble — and asks what accounts for such varied outcomes.
Beirut’s History Is Being Repaved
Incredibly, parts of Beirut’s Roman walls have survived all the intervening upheavals, human and natural, of the past two millennia. But these remnants, and the ancient tombstones the walls were lined with, are under threat — not from earthquakes or war, but the construction of a parking lot.
Inside Beirut’s Fight To Save Its Reading Culture
Lebanon’s bookshops once thrived as hubs of debate and dissent, but economic collapse, censorship and war have gutted Beirut’s literary scene. Still, readers, publishers and book cafes find inventive ways to resist and revive the culture of reading.
From Belfast to Beirut, A Tale of Elusive Peace
Power-sharing arrangements have attempted to bridge the divisions in the two societies. The Good Friday Agreement and the Lebanese Constitution both aim to provide a form of democracy that protects the minority community from the majority — or, in the case of Lebanon, any of the 18 religious groups from each other.
The Archivists of Lebanon’s Amnesia
The work of Khamissy, Hadla, and others fills a huge gap and is crucial for any form of genuine reconciliation and sustainable state-building in Lebanon, a fragmented country constantly on the brink. However, the country’s ruling class — its warlords and businessmen-turned-politicians and their cronies — aren’t too pleased.