Bingo in Baghdad

From Daniel Voll’s The Hunter Becomes the Hunted in Esquire:

Clemente arrived to interrogate the suspect, a handcuffed middle-aged man named Zaid, and underneath a napkin on the table, he found a small device, the size of a brick, with a hand crank and wires with alligator clips at the ends. Clemente shut down the interrogation, took Omar for a walk.

“Is that how you do police work?”

“Of course. We torture them.”

“Don’t you try to figure out what they are doing first, and who they work for?” Clemente asked.

Omar said, “No, why should I? This guy is a terrorist — he was going to blow up people.”

“We can flip him,” Clemente said. “Let me talk to him.”

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Sons and daughters

The poignant, universal story of inter generational drift (class, immigration) obliquely rendered by Benjamin Dewey:

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The religious impulse

Elif Batuman in the New Yorker:

The findings at Göbleki Tepe suggest that we have the story backward—that it was actually the need to build a scared site that first obliged hunter-gatherers to organize themselves as a workforce, to spend long periods in one place, to secure a stable food supply, and eventually to invent agriculture.