A portion of the wall in Bethlehem that separates the West Bank from Israel. Paul Michelson
Commentary

Stranger in a Strange Land

A state of war a decade before the Gaza War.


“Fact-finding mission.” The phrase kept popping to mind in the weeks before my wife Mardena and I left for the Middle East. When it did, I cringed inside. I’d never have said something like that out loud. In reality, all we’d be doing was traveling, as usual. It was obvious, though, why I was hung up on the phrase: it nailed why I wanted to go.

Creative Commons logoEarlier in that year, 2015, I’d made plans to visit Israel, the Palestinian West Bank, and Jordan. Mostly, it was the West Bank I wanted to see. I’d read a good deal about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, books by both Israeli and Palestinian writers. It was clear that life in the West Bank was hard—not as hard as in Gaza, but not good. Writers differed, though, on how hard it was. I wanted to see for myself.

I wasn’t looking for facts, exactly, not in the sense of anything I could document. I couldn’t speak Arabic or Hebrew, and I wouldn’t have an interpreter or guide. I was thinking of more informal research, a mix of observations and inferences—lots of inferences. Veteran journalists were reporting on the ongoing conflict in Israel and the West Bank, as they had for decades. I had only my observations—from an outsider’s untutored perspective—to help resolve my questions about the conflict.

We’d planned to travel to the region a year earlier, in 2014, but when war broke out between Israel and Hamas in July of that year, I cancelled everything. After the fighting ended, I read that Hamas would be preparing for another war before long. I decided that if we were going, we’d better go soon.

Continue reading Stranger in a Strange Land →

Paul Michelson lives and writes in Davis, California.

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Limestone bas-relief of a chariot race carved in the first or second centuries, reused in the ramparts of Narbonne. Musée Narbo Via / Tylwyth Eldar, via Wikimedia
Narbonne, France
Commentary

Tightrope Walking in Narbonne

On a whim, I headed to the other side of France on a music pilgrimage.


It’s 13:59, and the intercity Bordeaux-Narbonne departs at 14:00. I have sixty seconds to decide whether or not to stay on the train. I reread the text I just received from my Airbnb host in Narbonne: “I can’t receive you today, my apologies.”

Creative Commons logoMy son, who took me to the station, has already left in time to manage the afternoon shift at the Irish pub where he works. I’ve never been to Narbonne, the town in southern France where I’d hoped to spend my break. I’ll be forced to orient myself in an unfamiliar district and scramble—in 30°C heat—for a room in a pricey hotel.

I spiral into a panic, which grows in intensity even after I decide to stay on the train and begin planning for contingencies. I can’t find my password journal, which means I can’t message my Airbnb host, Rodolphe, via the app. I convince myself that I must have mislaid the journal while buying a pair of Reeboks earlier in the day, and perhaps someone is wiping my savings account while I agonize on the train.

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Lee Nash writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her work has been widely published in journals and anthologies and has won international competitions. Site: leenashwriting.com | Instagram

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Food Pack 2024, by Mariam Salah (oil pastel on paper). Salah posted this picture to Facebook on March 1, a day after the “Flour Massacre,” one of the deadliest mass-casualty events to take place in Gaza since the start of Israel’s military response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks on civilians and soldiers. As people gathered in Gaza City to receive food from aid trucks, Israeli troops fired on the crowd, killing more than 100 Palestinians. Image courtesy of Mariam Salah
Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip
Interviews

No One Has Been Left Untouched: A Conversation with Palestinian Artist Mariam Salah

An artist and teacher living in Gaza describes the past year of death and displacement, the daily hunt for food and firewood, and the limited power of art amid unending war.


What is life like in Gaza, more than a year since Israel began its military assault there? I spoke to Mariam Salah, a twenty-nine-year-old artist and teacher who lives there, for a personal perspective on the war. Salah has lost six family members and eight friends since Israeli forces swept into the Gaza Strip in response to a Hamas-led series of attacks on October 7, 2023. They are among the tens of thousands of Palestinians reported to have been killed during the ongoing conflict, which shows no sign of ending. An estimated 1.9 million out of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents have been displaced, while the fates of dozens of hostages taken by Hamas are still unknown.

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When the Israeli military assault began, Salah was living in Gaza City. She and her family have been forced to flee their homes several times since then. Currently, they are camping out in Khan Yunis in the south—“seeking shelter amid the rubble we’re surrounded by,” as she puts it.

A painter and sculptor, Salah had her work exhibited in galleries throughout Palestine before the war. She designed costumes, masks, and puppets for a local company called Theater Days. Salah also worked with children as an art teacher and art facilitator at schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main U.N. aid group in Gaza. She graduated in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in art education from Palestine’s Al-Aqsa University—since flattened by Israeli strikes. “Every single place I used to study or work has been turned into rubble.”

Continue reading No One Has Been Left Untouched: A Conversation with Palestinian Artist Mariam Salah →

Ayah Victoria McKhail is a writer based in Toronto, Canada.

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In Nomadland (2020), a drifter named Fern (played by Frances McDormand) works stints at Amazon warehouses while roaming the country by van. Searchlight Pictures
News

Fear and Loathing in the Fulfillment Center

The misery of the work in Amazon’s warehouses speaks to the hollowing out of the American dream.


In the twentieth century, the factory stood at the center of American life. Entire towns sprouted around them. Thanks to union-won wages, factory workers and their families could attain middle-class security. When I was writing a book about autoworkers, I kept hearing nostalgic stories of the way things used to be: however down on your luck you were, there was always a job waiting for you at the factory.

Creative Commons logoAfter decades of companies offshoring manufacturing employment, the factory is no longer the institution it once was. The Amazon fulfillment center has taken its place. They’re everywhere where the online retailer ships its goods—which is everywhere in the world. A third of the country’s warehouse workers—700,000 people—work at Amazon facilities preparing the company’s goods for delivery. After her plant closes, Frances McDormand’s character in Nomadland does seasonal stints at Amazon warehouses while she roams the country by van. It’s become a cliché that Amazon is where you go if you want a job that pays more than the minimum, but that any able-bodied person can do.

That’s why it’s so troubling to read the research about how bad Amazon jobs have become. Take the findings of an academic survey released late last year, which drew from a nationally representative sample of Amazon warehouse workers. What comes across clearly is the true cost of getting your packages lightning fast. University of Illinois researchers found that four out of ten warehouse workers have been injured on the job. Half said they feel burnt out. And rather than lightening the load of its warehouse workforce, Amazon’s innovative use of technology appears to be at the root of these problems. Majorities of those reporting injuries or burnout said they felt a sense of pressure to work faster. Two-thirds said they had to take unpaid time off due to pain or exhaustion in the past month—which the study’s researchers link to the company’s algorithm-intensified pace on the floor.

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Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

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The Kingdom Centre building in Riyadh. Buen Viajero, via Flickr
Commentary

An Endgame for Iran: A Saudi-Style Revolution from Above

Experiencing firsthand the dramatic reforms that Saudi Arabia has made in the two decades since I lived there gives me hope for another Muslim nation held in thrall by fundamentalists.


In Riyadh for a business trip, I found myself with a couple of hours to kill. I decided to wander around Al Olaya, the Saudi capital’s commercial core and upscale shopping district. In a gleaming shopping mall surrounding my hotel, I saw familiar brand logos on either side, a glitzy array of high-end storefronts much like those you’d find in any major Western city—except for the stylized Arabic lettering. Eventually, I came across the garish window display of a Victoria’s Secret. There I stopped, amazed.

Creative Commons logoI had actually lived in Riyadh two decades earlier, having come to Saudi Arabia to work as a physician. At the time, there were no Victoria’s Secret stores to be found. The company’s website was even blocked by the religious authorities. Women could buy lingerie, but they had to do so in a general store—and all the shops back then were staffed exclusively by male attendants (women were not allowed to work in most public spaces). All these prohibitions had made shopping for intimate apparel a singularly humiliating experience.

So much had changed in Saudi Arabia, and it wasn’t just about the overt femininity of a lingerie store. I walked into another familiar Western store, a Louis Vuitton boutique. The fall collection was being displayed—luxury scarves, elegant handbags—much the same as it would be in New York City. The mannequins wore shorts and dresses with bare plastic legs. But what captured my attention were their heads—molded plastic, with detailed facial features. Two decades ago, that depiction of the female form was forbidden. The mannequins back then would have been headless.

I must have looked ever so slightly lunatic in that store, gawking at the mannequins. Soon enough, a store clerk approached me, and we began talking about my impressions of the new Saudi Arabia. A group of attendants—all of them, notably, women—began to gather, curious about my excited chatter. I explained to them that when I lived in Riyadh, the mall had a designated floor just for women, the only place in this mall where we were allowed to shop. Even having that women-only space had been an advance at the time; other malls would only let women shop during restricted hours when men would not be present.

As I told the women about their country’s recent past, I felt like a time traveler speaking of unimaginable sights. All the store clerks were young—not surprising in a country where two-thirds of the population is under thirty. While some of them wore headscarves, others did not. They seemed to find my enthusiasm infectious, and they asked many questions. We ended our impromptu chat with the conclusion that, yes, this was Islam: the freedom for a woman to choose how to observe, to choose how to be.

Since I’ve returned from my trip, I’ve thought often about how much Saudi Arabia has changed—and whether another Muslim country, Iran, might take a similar path. For several months beginning in September, Iran was paralyzed by massive protests unlike any the country had seen since the 1979 revolution. The spark of this explosive rage was the suspicious death of Mahsa Jina Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who had been detained by police for “improperly” wearing her hijab.

Continue reading An Endgame for Iran: A Saudi-Style Revolution from Above →

Qanta A. Ahmed, MD, is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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A top-rated show in South Korea, the romantic drama Crash Landing on You drew millions of international viewers and won accolades from Western publications like Time, Variety, Elle, and the Guardian. Netflix
Oak Park, Illinois
Creative Commons / Reviews

Crash Landing on the U.S.

From thrillers like Squid Game to romantic comedies like Crash Landing on You, K-dramas have attracted large and loyal followings outside Korea. While problematic content occasionally crops up, I’ve found a welcome escape—and a welcoming fan community—through their relatable stories.


To put it bluntly, the past few years have been exhausting. That’s been all the more true for the African American community, which has suffered not only a disproportionate number of Covid deaths, but also high-profile killings at the hands of police and White nationalists. Since the pandemic began in 2020, I’ve found myself particularly isolated because of an autoimmune illness, which has made leaving home especially risky and taken away my ability to travel internationally—an outlet I’d relied upon in the past whenever anti-Black racism had gotten to me.

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When the lockdowns were at their worst, and Black death seemed everywhere, Hollywood didn’t offer much of a respite—shows and films like Lovecraft Country, Underground, and Antebellum still hit too close to home. Browsing on Netflix one night, I came across Chocolate, a Korean drama about a chef who falls in love with a neurosurgeon. As a child, the doctor dreamed of becoming a professional chef himself, and the two bond over their passion for cooking. At a time when Covid was raging unchecked across the country, this foreign-language tearjerker set in a hospice ward connected deeply with me, helping me to mourn the thousands dying every day. I was hooked. After that first taste, I dove deeply into the catalog of South Korean dramas now available on online streaming platforms. Since then, I’ve become a devoted fan.

In recent years, “K-dramas” have steadily gained a foothold among American audiences, riding a larger “Korean wave” of wildly popular K-pop musical groups like BTS and Blackpink and celebrated Korean filmmakers like Bong Joon-ho (director of the Academy Award-winning 2019 film Parasite). You can see this trend as yet another sign of globalization: the growing interconnectedness of the world’s markets and cultures. As singularly dominant as Hollywood has been over the past century, creators in other countries are increasingly able and eager to get their homegrown work shown widely in global media markets. The flow of blockbuster pop culture is no longer so one-way.

As someone tired of hearing the same stories from American shows and movies, I’ve found it refreshing to see Korean (and Nigerian and Brazilian) perspectives on TV. At the same time, the surging popularity of K-dramas has brought with it a host of concerns about representation and historical accuracy, as recent controversies underscore.

Continue reading Crash Landing on the U.S. →

Chinyere Osuji is the author of Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race, uses social science to understand how Blacks interact with ethnic and racial “others,” and has watched Something in the Rain five times. Site | Instagram | Twitter | Clubhouse

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The lone surviving "dragon pine" on the shore of Cape Iwai in Kesennuma.
Rikuzentakata, Japan
Commentary / Creative Commons

Deep Scars

Cycling around Japan’s post-tsunami peninsulas, eleven years after March 11, 2011.


I had my first glimpse of the tsunami’s destruction three years ago, when I rode my bike along the northeastern coast of Japan’s main island. Below a snaking seawall was a wide swath of barren fields and muddy marshes. The raw landscape was punctuated by the gutted remains of a five-story residential building. On its side was a red line that marked the highest level reached by the tsunami’s floodwaters: 14.5 meters (48 feet).

Japan’s 2011 tsunami killed some 20,000 people and left thousands more to dig their way out of the mud. Triggered by one of the most powerful earthquakes recorded in modern times, the overpowering tidal wave devastated the country’s northeastern region of Tōhoku across three prefectures. It also caused the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, prompting the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of residents. Most of the deaths and damage occurred along the Sanriku Coast just to the north. When I first visited Rikuzentakata, one of Sanriku’s hardest-hit cities, I was shocked by how visible the scars still were.

At the end of last year, I returned to Rikuzentakata for the Tour de Sanriku, a bicycle ride along the Hirota peninsula that the city has put on since the summer of 2011. Japan has plenty of cycle routes that are more scenic and in much more accessible locations, but like so many others, I wanted to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the March 11, 2011 tsunami—commonly referred to as “3.11”—and see how the recovery was going.

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Cherise Fong is a bicycle traveler, writer, and journalist currently based in Japan.

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Masked young people in the neighborhood around Columbia University in New York. Susan Jane Golding, via Flickr
Richmond, Virginia
News

Inequalities on the Digital Campus

Class and race have shaped the realities of online learning in deep, sometimes unexpected ways.


When the pandemic struck in 2020 and classes went virtual, students scrambled to adjust. A twenty-two-year-old Filipina American psychology major at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) from a working-class background told us about the difficulties she faced attending her classes and getting her homework done. Her apartment’s unstable internet connection often booted her out of class, and she was stymied by the fact that she didn’t even have a desk at home. Because desks were sold out at many stores at the start of the pandemic, she built a wobbly makeshift one out of shelves she bought at a hardware store.

A year later, the challenges continued because of the condition of the small apartment she shared with a roommate. Her bedroom ceiling leaked whenever it rained. Her bed was ruined after a storm, and her landlord had yet to fix the problem (the bucket she used to catch the ceiling drips was visible during our Zoom interview). Along with the “paper-thin” walls of her apartment, these various at-home distractions made it hard to concentrate on academics, she said.

What impact did the shift to virtual learning have on the millions of college and graduate students forced to study—either partly or wholly—at home? Through research conducted at VCU in Richmond, we found that class and race shaped the realities of online learning in 2020 and 2021 in deep, sometimes unexpected ways that largely revolved around the family resources available to students.

Continue reading Inequalities on the Digital Campus →

Alice Quach is a sociologist based in Virginia Beach with degrees from the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University.

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Peppers and watermelons harvested by the Yolo Food Bank's volunteers this fall.
Blog

High-Hanging Fruit


Every so often I will drive by farmworkers toiling in the fields near my home in Davis, a town in rural Yolo County, California. Even in the middle of the summer, everyone will be covered from head to toe in long-sleeved shirts, khaki work pants or blue jeans, wide-brimmed hats, and work boots. It’s always a colorful scene. Cars of different shades, glinting in the sun, lined up along the dirt road running past the field. The faded reds, greens, blues, and browns of old work clothes. Rows of green crops, sunshine pouring down from a powdery blue sky, a line of rolling brown hills on the horizon.

When I saw several months ago that the Yolo Food Bank was looking for volunteers to do some harvesting, I signed up. I respected the work the food bank did, and I was curious about what went on in the fields of California’s Central Valley. In the back of my mind, too, were articles I’d read about how very few native-born Americans signed up to do farm work nowadays—and how those who did would quit right away. The articles would make shocking claims: Just a handful of the hundreds of Americans who apply for farm jobs in North Carolina last the season. A California grape farmer raised his average wage to $20 an hour, but his U.S.-born workers kept quitting: “We’ve never had one come back after lunch.” An Alabama tomato farmer said that in twenty-five years of farming, he could “count on my hand the number of Americans that stuck.” Was it true that migrant laborers were taking jobs that locals could be doing? Or was the work just too hard to attract Americans raised in relative privilege? I wanted to see for myself what harvesting was like.

Continue reading High-Hanging Fruit →

Paul Michelson lives and writes in Davis, California.

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A local Afghan man in the Bala Murghab district in northwestern Afghanistan talks through an interpreter (right) to U.S. Army personnel as children gather on the hill. Kevin Wallace, via Flickr
Tarin Kot, Afghanistan
Interviews

‘Life Will Be Bitter for Us’: An Interview with an Afghan Interpreter

The U.S. evacuation left behind many Afghan interpreters who helped coalition forces over the course of the two-decade war, placing them in danger once again.


Over the past several weeks, the United States evacuated more than 120,000 people from Afghanistan, officially ending its two decades-long military presence there on Aug. 31. Only about half of those airlifted out of the country were Afghans. That means that a “majority” of those Afghans who had worked for the U.S. military and applied for Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) were left behind, according to a senior U.S. State Department official quoted by NBC News.

Many of these Afghans served as interpreters for U.S. forces. When I was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011, I taught an advanced English class for interpreters. I recorded the interview below with one of them, who has since become a friend. This Afghan man (who prefers not to use his real name, given the danger to his family) worked for the American, Dutch, and Australian militaries during their presence in the country. (The Dutch forces left Afghanistan in 2011, and the last of the Australian troops in 2013.) Fortunately, my friend was able to relocate to Australia after the Taliban seized control. But many of his fellow interpreters remain in Afghanistan and fear reprisals.

In this 2011 interview, my friend talks about the danger and distrust that interpreters regularly experienced on their patrols, and their worries about what would happen to them once foreign troops left. For their troubles, interpreters like him were paid 600 U.S. dollars a month—with the additional expectation that they would be taken care of in the event that the Taliban regained control of the country and sought to punish those who had assisted their adversaries.

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Anna Chan is a writer based in Florida.

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Isla Mujeres, Mexico
Commentary

Letting Dogs Lie

Recalling a life-and-death decision on a deserted road.


It was decades ago, but I still remember the German guy. He could have ignored the pups, left them to die in the brush, but he didn’t. Instead, he biked into town and found the local police, but they just blew him off. So he went back. It was the compassionate thing to do, but it left him with an impossible choice: either let the pups die, or kill them.

My girlfriend Mardena and I had come to Cancún, Mexico, from a winter deep-freeze in the United States. We were staying in a little hotel on a downtown side street, a mile inland from the city’s glitzy beachfront hotel zone. Every morning I’d head out for an early run to beat the heat, but it never worked. Even at dawn, the heat and humidity were already draining. I remember one evening when Mardena and I were on the bus heading back to our hotel after a day on the beach. I looked out the window and saw the sun sinking into the horizon like a giant orange beach ball. It was the end of December, on one of the shortest days of winter, and it was still hot as blazes.

One morning we took a boat from the mainland over to Isla Mujeres, a skinny island a few miles east of Cancún. We planned to bicycle around the island and cool off in the turquoise waters at its north end. The day was heating up fast, so we stopped at the first bike shop we found, rented clunky one-speeders at two dollars apiece, and started out along a coastal road.

Continue reading Letting Dogs Lie →

Paul Michelson lives and writes in Davis, California.

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The Alberta Cooperative Grocery in Portland, Oregon. Old White Truck, via Flickr
Commentary

Pandemic-Proofing the Economy with Cooperatives

Cooperatives and other alternative enterprises can make economies more resilient to crises like Covid-19.


With customers staying at home during the pandemic, large numbers of businesses have shuttered permanently, unable to cover their payroll and rent. Emergency governmental assistance has sustained some businesses during this period of economic uncertainty, but the crisis has also stoked interest in a private sector remedy: cooperatives.

In Baltimore, a pizzeria that shut when the pandemic hit reopened as a worker cooperative, its ownership shared equally among its fourteen original employees. In Albuquerque, N.M., small farms pivoted from supporting restaurants and farmers markets, pooling their produce to sell directly to households. In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a program to help struggling businesses reopen as employee-owned businesses.

As Congress deliberates how to safeguard the country from future crises, policymakers should consider recent research that shows how so-called alternative enterprises can make local economies more resilient. Sociologist Marc Schneiberg finds that counties with more cooperatives, credit unions, community banks, nonprofit organizations, and universities experienced fewer job losses during the Great Recession and greater job growth in its aftermath. This path-breaking finding suggests that such organizations are better able than their shareholder-owned counterparts to retain workforces when the economy falters—and more willing to invest in their communities when markets pick up again. 

Continue reading Pandemic-Proofing the Economy with Cooperatives →

Katherine K. Chen is an associate professor of sociology at the City College of New York and Graduate Center, CUNY. With Victor Tan Chen (no relation), she is the editor of the book Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities Through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy (Emerald Publishing, 2021).

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