What It Takes to Be Mister Lebanon

As opportunities shrink in Lebanon, contestants are pouring increasing amounts of time, money and effort into the country’s most famous male beauty pageant, and the possibilities it might unlock

The Date Palm Had One More Thing to Give, and Datecrete Has a Seoul Design Award Prize to Prove It

A stubborn little seed, an unlikely experiment and years of material research. Datecrete Studio & Lab challenges what we consider waste and what we imagine architecture could become

5 Young Arab Designers Who Refuse to Blend In

The emerging cohort of designers transforming raw material into a living temperament

Time Tells Tales: What Your Watch Says About You

What can a watch reveal beyond the time? A quiet expression of cultivated taste, unspoken ambition, and the subtle art of making a statement without saying a word

Notes on Lebanese Frenchies and the In Vitro Diaspora

Francophilia has long been a part of Lebanon’s complex sociopolitical fabric. The Frenchies of the country detach themselves from their environment and enjoy a bourgeois French-centric mode of existence. In the wake of ongoing national crises, members of the francophone middle class are becoming increasingly critical of their upbringing and aim to re-appropriate a certain sense of Lebaneseness

Okay, but who’s actually buying these Saddam Hussein watches? And why?

On the strange afterlife of Saddam Hussein watches and what their thriving resale trade says about nostalgia, myth-making, and a region's unresolved relationship with its strongmen

Ugliness Looks Back

From a 1960s Iranian leper colony to Kim Kardashian's surgeon, tracing how "ugly" became a diagnosis to be cured rather than a way of being seen

The sky held it, the earth remembered: A moving memoir of scale, loss and time

At Ishara Art Foundation, Rohini Devasher, Shahana Rajani and Sarker Protick trace ecological change from the cosmos to a drowned delta to the streets of Dhaka, asking what it means to grieve a landscape on a human scale