Sharing a few recent reviews for The New Republic:
In 2022-2023 I was back on the war on terror beat, working for Serial podcast's latest season on Guantánamo. It came out last year, and you can listen to it here. My favorite episodes are the last three, and in truth, those are the ones I had the least to do with, since they were completed after my time there finished. The final two concern the military commissions at Guantánamo and questions of justice and closure, themes I revisited in a review of Emmanuel Carrère's new book V13, for The New Republic. It's a very unusual piece of court reporting, a beautiful book about a brutal subject — the terror attacks in Paris in November, 2015 — and it caused me to think about the way the war on terror has foreclosed the possibility of closure for the 9/11 attacks.
I also wrote recently for TNR about a crop of what I'm calling little motherhood memoirs: mostly short, often fragmented, sometimes quirky books that capture the particular fecundity and frustrations of pregnancy, birth and childrearing. I focused mainly on Ayşegül Savaş’s The Wilderness, and gave Alejandro Zambra, a dad, honorary membership to the club. Having read probably too many such books in these first years of being a parent, I also wrote about how their smallness has me thinking about the literary stakes of the genre, and about Natalia Ginzburg, who once wrote: "I no longer wanted to write like a man, because I had had children and I thought I knew a great many things about tomato sauce and even if I didn't put them into my story it helped my vocation that I knew them.”