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

5 Young Arab Designers Who Refuse to Blend In

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

Richard Mille: Ancient Past to Feat of Engineering

Beneath the beauty of a gem-set object lies a story of engineering, where centuries of craftsmanship meet extraordinary technical precision. At Richard Mille, this ancient craft challenges the very limits of what gem-setting can achieve

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

Eurovision, Samira Said, and Morocco’s Unreceived Love Letter

Revisiting Morocco’s choice to perform at Eurovision in 1980, the first and last Arab country to do so, reveals a complex web of forces at play in our history, and a legacy that stands in evidence of a confused national identity, much less healed from colonial violation than it purports to be

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