At The Drift, an interview with historian Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, about the situation in Gaza and the media coverage of the war: “I used to write about Soviet Middle East policy, and in those days, the only sources we had were Pravda, Izvestia, Krasnaya Zvezda, and so on. I feel today like I’m back in the Cold War and The New York Pravda Times and Washington Izvestia Post are mouthpieces for the Biden administration.”
An open letter about the Gaza war posted on Artforum.com with more than 8,000 signatures has been updated: “We . . . would like to repeat that we reject ‘violence against all civilians, regardless of their identity,’ and share revulsion at the horrific massacres of 1400 people in Israel conducted by Hamas on October 7th. We mourn all civilian casualties. We hope for the expeditious release of all hostages and continue to call for an immediate ceasefire.”
The new issue of the London Review of Books features Israeli architect Eyal Weizman on the history of the Israeli settlements around the Gaza Strip.
Issue three of Parapraxis is available to preorder now. The theme is “The Wish”: “Psychoanalysis, one could say, was originally a science of wishes. But as we may have been told since the morality plots of Aesop’s fables, we have to be careful what we wish for, lest it come true.”
For the New Yorker, Bookforum editor David O’Neill writes about David Wojnarowicz’s correspondence with his Parisian lover, Jean Pierre Delage, between 1979 and 1982. The letters, edited by James Hoff and published by Primary Information, reveal the artist “as funny, uncertain, insecure, elusive, transgressive, and unexpectedly devoted.” Also unguarded: writing to Delage, “he casually presents cheerfully depraved pieces—for example, his 1979 Xerox collage of a saintly Jean Genet with Jesus shooting up—without fear or commentary, a form of reserve that reads as an expression of trust.”
