Starting from Ground Zero by Michiko Oki

Essays

When a postcard arrived from a friend, I was in my late teens, living in the passive-aggressive air of the bright grey sky in a tiny room in Kobe. The picture on the postcard was seemingly drawn hastily in a graffiti-like style in pale pastel colours. In it, a woman in pyjamas with dark, messy hair is sitting on a single bed, slightly hunched over and covering her mouth with her hands. She appears lost in thought, blankly bemused, as she stares at an open suitcase in front of her, waiting to be filled, with piles of books lying next to it. From her strangely impassive face, I heard an inaudible voice oozing out—“What shall I do?”

Wrecked by Megan K.D. Gordon

Essays

The Great Ocean Road, a single-lane ribbon at the top of sheer bluffs outside Melbourne in Australia, is called the Shipwreck Coast. It’s so named after the hundreds of boats that journeyed from Europe in the nineteenth century looking for safe harbor—and finding anything but. One hundred years later, my own family journeyed from America to Australia, looking for safe harbor. Though by the 1990s, Qantas and in-flight service had supplanted the clippers and barques that smashed into the cliffs so long ago.

Homesick, USA by Liam A. Faulkner

Essays

Grief has been on our minds lately, both my patient’s and mine. In addition to the anguish inherent in his transatlantic move and resultant “regressus ad uterum,” our work has also touched upon the grief we share with many of our fellow Americans at the loss of another home, another nurturing womb: that of the very country he grew up in and to which I moved.

Psychic Irredentism by Lucas McGranahan

Essays

This reflective piece traces a journey through Bulgaria and Albania, weaving together encounters with strangers, political history, and the inner experience of foreignness. Moving from monasteries and mountain villages to bustling Balkan cities, the essay explores how travel exposes the boundaries between self and world.

In Memoriam: Sara Mansfield Taber

Essays

Sara Mansfield Taber (1954–2026) lived a life of curiosity, writing, and service. A memoirist, teacher, and social worker, she authored seven books and mentored writers around the world. Through projects supporting healthcare workers, Afghan students, and immigration advocates, she used writing as a tool for resilience, connection, and understanding.

Splitting Genocide by Celeste Kelly

Essays

We can’t split something off when we’re surrounded by it. The same forces flattening Gaza are showing up here under different names—economic inequality, xenophobia, the rollback of human rights. I’m trying to bridge the divide between denial and collapse, to find ways of staying engaged without turning away.

My Home: Kidnappings in New York by Sonni Mun

Essays

My first day volunteering at immigration court began with a medical emergency. A man had collapsed in his wheelchair while DHS officers surrounded his terrified family. When I identified myself as a physician, they demanded proof before allowing me to help. In that moment, I understood what it meant to live in a country where mercy requires credentials—and where witnessing itself can feel like an act of resistance.

Dreaming of Crimea by Oleksandra Kurbala

Essays

Every spring, my mother dreamt of Crimea, and that’s how we knew winter was ending. Now, exiled from those shores, I still dream of its herbs, its sea, its air. Eleven years have passed since I last returned. For those displaced by Russia’s war, the longing for Crimea is both memory and wound — a repetition of trauma that we carry within us, and around which, somehow, we grow.

Why Him and Not Me? Speaking of Home, An Update by Karim G. Dajani

Essays

In late October 2023, Eyal and I began a correspondence. We generated two publications and a film about our histories. In the process, something began to cohere between us. Our dialogue revealed a common humanity. He was willing to understand and change, and so was I. On a personal level, we found a way to forge a bond. On a collective level, he is Israeli. He comes from that group and belongs to it. I am a displaced Palestinian who comes from and belongs to a group that is being decimated by what is best described as a massive war crime being committed by Israel in response to a brutal and gruesome attack by Hamas fighters that killed 1,200 Israelis.

When Trauma No Longer Resembles What We Read in Books by Dr. Mohamed Omran Abu Shawish

Essays

In Gaza, we live in a state that feels like waking up after a long night of fragmented, restless sleep. It’s as if you’ve spent the night on the edge of fear—between the hum of drones, the echo of explosions, and the relentless pounding of your own heart. You wake up with a head that feels as heavy as the earth itself, your eyes swollen and tired, your body limp and worn. Conversations are dull, voices are low, emotions seem colorless … not because of sleep deprivation, but because of hunger, despair, and a prolonged absence of safety.

Demands for Recognition by JT Mikulka

Essays

While the idea of “discovery” holds many meanings, I consider here the way it was and continues to be used as a colonizing concept. Christo-European monarchs used the Doctrine of Discovery to lay claim to land they deemed uninhabited despite the presence of indigenous peoples—negating their humanity and existence. Further in 1823, US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall enshrined the Doctrine of Discovery into US law in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) in order to justify withholding land from indigenous peoples. Discovery portends the idea that someone has found something previously unknown to others, and that the discoverers have the right to lay claim to this knowledge, land, or space. “Discovery” in this way erases those present before, like the erasure of the Javanese sailors that had navigated the Cape of Good Hope long before the Portuguese or how many of Freud’s discoveries of the unconscious and the mind were long known to many different peoples across the world (Said, 2003).

Looking into the Face of the Gorgon by Dana Amir and Azz a-Din

Essays

The floors are red, not as a metaphor, not as a political statement; they are red. And this is what I ask myself: Is our blood even red? Are we made of the same substance, the same suffering, the same divine breath that once stirred a man’s lungs? If so, why do we die like vermin, why does the world avert its eyes while we rot in plain sight? Why does the hunger of a single hostage shake the souls of nations, while the emaciated bodies of a million children elicit only polite disbelief?

Our Children: Discarded, Disdained, and Destroyed by Jyoti M. Rao

Essays

Such desires must be obfuscated. Indeed, in the face of blatant refusal to protect children, which amounts to relentless aggression against them, we find psychoanalytically curious invocations of protection amidst active harm, a phenomenon observable in abusive families and troubled intrapsychic environs alike. ‘Protective custody’ results in incarcerated children—another pause-worthy phrase that describes a violation of children’s rights per the Convention—languishing alone in solitary confinement for their ostensible protection in adult prisons.

Why We Can’t Stop Our Children from Dying of Gun Violence by Irwin Kula

Essays

Individual positions may be factually accurate or morally defensible. But the rightness of any particular position matters less than understanding how all positions function within an unconscious system that ‘works’ for everyone—allowing us to maintain our identities, our professional roles, our political affiliations, our ways of life, while experiencing ourselves as caring, engaged people who are doing something about this terrible problem. Our ritualized response to school shootings, going back to the Columbine shooting more than twenty-five years ago, protects us from confronting the transformations required to address this tragedy.

We’ve Had a Problem by Patrick Cole

Essays

The astronauts on Apollo 13 had all piloted fighter jets and held jobs flying newer planes to ensure they were not prone to pitching and yawing and, you know, breaking up in midair. This kind of person does not dwell on the past. Consequently, the tense of the phrase “we’ve had a problem”: the initial problem is over, now we focus on making a plan for repairing the damage and resuming the mission. It is no surprise that in the wider populace, the words were wrangled back into the present tense as a cry for help. To us civilians, an explosion that occurred a few seconds ago is a current problem, and so we treat ourselves to a few minutes of high panic.

here and not here by Andrea Luka Zimmerman

Essays

Hind tells me about the Israeli Ambassadors’ Forest (for diplomats to Israel) and how the planting of trees erases history, covers former villages and renders them antique, cloaks graveyards, uses up groundwater and destroys the delicate ecological balance, while also denying those who have inhabited the region for centuries, especially the Bedouin of the Al-Naqab, their rights to the land. Only the former South African ambassador refused to have trees planted in his or his country’s name, saying that it replicated apartheid.