As China increases its threats toward Taiwan, people on the island are preparing for invasion. Michelle Kuo attends two civil-defense courses, learning how to pack gauze into open wounds, identify Chinese disinformation campaigns and more. Can Taiwan save itself? www.thedial.world/articles/new...
Dial Magazine asked me to keep a diary for the last month of the war.
www.thedial.world/articles/new...
"Yesterday I lay on my back on the bed, smoking. I never smoke in the bedroom, but war, like wine, sorrow, and love, erases one’s most basic disciplines and pushes aside all pleasantries."
www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...
“How does the absence of the mother affect a child?” Amanda Marton Ramaciotti asks. In this essay, Marton Ramaciotti writes about adoring her mother while fearing schizophrenia, the disease that made her leave. www.thedial.world/articles/new...
"Their Name is Piehsak" found a nice spot in the form of an online photo-essay in The Dial. All the Khmer that are still displaced thank The Dial for not forgetting them.
Very dystopian timing. I’ve been working on this since November.
Thanks @thedialmag.bsky.social
In a conversation at the Bergen International Literary Festival, Albanian author Lea Ypi and American poet Joy Williams discussed translations of their work with Polish translator Julia Wiedlocha—and how they feel about big changes to their texts and being translated by AI.
Monarch butterflies on a tree. Title below reads 'Meditations – Esther King on Leo Boix's Southernmost: Sonnets' with a subheading reading 'Wasafiri 124 online exclusive'
@esthermavis.bsky.social reads Leo Boix's collection SOUTHERNMOST SONNETS (Chatto & Windus 2025), reflecting on the 'push and pull of belonging to different places' and how it has shaped her understandings of home, geography, partnership, family, and grief.
Read: www.wasafiri.org/content/medi...
I wrote a piece for Wasafiri about living in multiple languages and finding home. With thanks to the thoughtful editors at @wasafirimag.bsky.social
www.wasafiri.org/content/medi...
“As world powers debate Gaza’s future...what will remain of its past?”—Madeleine Schwartz (@mmschwartz.bsky.social) on Gaza’s archaeological relics https://go.nybooks.com/46bM65P
Anna Juul reflects on the disappearance of physical mail in Denmark — and what a hyper-digital society gains and loses when letters, handwriting, and slower communication fade away: www.thedial.world/articles/new...
In our weekly Top 5:
—Lessons from apartheid (@thedialmag.bsky.social)
—Clever Claude? (@newyorker.com )
—Bodies anew (@GeorgiaReview)
—Wax on, wax off (@grist.org)
—Mine’s free (Dispatch Magazine)
longreads.com/2026/02/13/t...
A great — maybe even uplifting? — read from @imogenwk.bsky.social on Wikipedia in the age of AI
During Trump’s first term, many Americans believed he was an exception in an otherwise functional political system. But the Turkish right saw what they refused to see: The American president could do what he wanted. Kaya Genç reports: www.thedial.world/articles/new...
White people were not the intended victims of South Africa’s apartheid, but the police state heavily circumscribed its white citizens’ lives. People were censored and abused. As American conservatives idealize the apartheid era, Eve Fairbanks sends a warning: no one is protected in a police state.
A very good read (and still, once again, very relevant)
When Amir Ahmadi Arian was an aspiring writer growing up in Iran, almost everyone he met told him to read Sadeq Hedayat’s 1936 novel “The Blind Owl.” The work is not a pinnacle of literary craftsmanship, Arian writes, but it is an essential text for understanding the contradictions of Iran.
In Rafaqat Hayat’s short story, translated from Urdu by Hammad Rind, a bus conductor is given a pack of sweet, fragrant cigarettes. The joy of owning something new and the pleasure of their unexpected taste is tinged by the reality that soon he’ll have none left. www.thedial.world/articles/lit...
Amir Ahmadi Arian on the blackout in Iran https://go.nybooks.com/4jOx63p
"We’re selling vibes, textures. A sunset on the hills in Chianti, riding a bike on an island in Sicily. Imagine us discussing it in parliament with an Italian accent: l’importanza del made in Italy. We use the English expression unironically. It’s aimed at Americans," Francesco Pacifico writes.
How are fiction authors thinking about AI? Jessi Jezewska Stevens read a handful of recent novels that grapple with the anxiety and confusion of this new technology. Rather than predict the future as most science fiction does, these novels extend the present in an utterly recognizable way.
“Learn all the cheat codes, participate in all the pre-game warmups: It’s still impossible to predict where a conversation might take you.” Lamorna Ash read three self-help books that promise to teach us how to have better conversations: www.thedial.world/articles/new...
In 2018, two months before his 33rd birthday, Egyptian writer @ahmednaji.bsky.social arrived in the U.S. on a one-way ticket in a journey of exile and self-reinvention. These are excerpts from his journals from that time: www.thedial.world/articles/new...
Today, we’re kicking off our end-of-year fundraising campaign. Support The Dial in promoting the exchange of ideas across borders! www.thedial.world/support
Can't wait to answer your questions 👀
"But one fact remains and that’s if you're dead, it doesn't matter which leader 6,000 miles away never knew your name, never knew your story."
www.thedial.world/articles/new...
I wrote this last year during the worst days of the war. Much of it still applies.
Delighted to have a new article with The Dial - this time on tech giants, their alarming inflation of our GDP, and the mutation of the Dublin docklands from the early 2000s to today. Thanks to The Dial for the commission & their wonderful & astute editorial support.
