Nabil Salih
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nabilsalih.bsky.social
Nabil Salih
@nabilsalih.bsky.social
A writer and photographer from Baghdad: @lrb.co.uk, @nybooks.com, @jacobinmag.bsky.social, and elsewhere.

linktr.ee/NabilSalih
Reposted by Nabil Salih
‘By his own estimate, Jonathan Tokeley-Parry smuggled three thousand antiquities out of Egypt in 65 trips over six years. His success was down to his skill as a “fabricator”.’

Erin L. Thompson (@artcrimeprof.bsky.social) on the blog:

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/no...
Erin L. Thompson | Fake it till you make it
Jonathan Tokeley-Parry, who died last month, had a business card in the early 1990s that described him as ‘Jonty “...
www.lrb.co.uk
November 24, 2025 at 6:40 PM
Reposted by Nabil Salih
US peace plan: What could Ukraine compromise on? We look at issues where differences will be extremely difficult to bridge and others where compromise may prove less hard to find. www.ft.com/content/c24e... via @FT
US peace plan: What could Ukraine compromise on?
Turning the document into something acceptable for Kyiv and its European allies will be a mammoth diplomatic undertaking
www.ft.com
November 23, 2025 at 8:54 PM
"Palestinians will struggle to remain even in the 47 percent of Gaza still accessible to them. That may well, in fact, be precisely what the current reconstruction plans are meant to achieve."

@nybooks.com
www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...
Gaza: The Threat of Partition | Sari Bashi
On Monday the United Nations Security Council endorsed President Donald Trump’s twenty-point peace plan for Gaza, which creates a “Board of Peace,”
www.nybooks.com
November 23, 2025 at 3:16 PM
In Russian-Occupied Mariupol, Everything Ukrainian Must Go
www.nytimes.com
November 23, 2025 at 1:03 PM
"Josefina climbed down a wooden ladder into the pit and ran a finger along the vertebrae. Then she closed her eyes, whispered something and kissed the skull. I felt that I shouldn’t be watching and went for a walk around the graveyard."

Stephen Phelan in the @lrb.co.uk
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Stephen Phelan · Diary: Spain’s Disappeared
Emilio Silva set up the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica to improve and formalise the process...
www.lrb.co.uk
November 22, 2025 at 2:28 PM
"The colours of these clothes – several greys and dark blues, a dash of turquoise green and a bright red – break the heart. They allude to a life outside of this nightmare."

On Titian, Abu Ghraib, and Gaza in the @equatormag.bsky.social
www.equator.org/articles/pit...
Pity and Fear • EQUATOR
What images of cruelty reveal about the limits of power
www.equator.org
November 21, 2025 at 9:24 AM
‘We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side’, he told a television audience, insisting that victory required spending ‘time in the shadows’.
'He dissimulated even when the truth would have served him. Disclosure invited scrutiny; scrutiny invited limits; limits imperilled the office.'

Grey Anderson on Dick Cheney (1941–2025):

newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...
Grey Anderson, Iron-Ass — Sidecar
Dick Cheney (1941-2025).
newleftreview.org
November 20, 2025 at 10:26 PM
Unbelievable. Iraq closer to the World Cup. 2-1 over the Emirates in Basra. Football, for once, triumphs for the poor. “This is how the besieged play,” goes a 1990s song. Behold.
November 18, 2025 at 6:09 PM
Reposted by Nabil Salih
For 50 years, the Nobel committee has rejected the candidacies of dissidents from the Western world. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have worked for peace in a different way from Machado. But they possess one flaw: they expose our own dirty secrets.
Give him a prize!
Open access // by Benoît Bréville (Le Monde diplomatique - English edition, November 2025)
mondediplo.com
November 14, 2025 at 5:37 PM
"It was on a visit home to Jerusalem in 1951 that Katy introduced Soraya, now studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, to the novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who encouraged her to write."

@selmadabbagh.bsky.social in the @parisreview.bsky.social
www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/11...
Soraya Antonius’s Portrait of a Lost Palestine by Selma Dabbagh
November 14, 2025 – “With her pen, Antonius rebuilds villages and cities, replants crops, observes the weather, curates national festivals, and depicts both Palestinian and British high society.”
www.theparisreview.org
November 14, 2025 at 5:25 PM
"The foot-tall apparitions leaped from one wall to the next, like ghosts insisting on telling their stories."

Beautiful in the @nybooks.com on the Bukhara Biennial, its relics of Soviet architecture, and Uzbek politics old and new.
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
Mixed Blessings | Sophie Pinkham
Uzbekistan has a new biennial, but how many of its aesthetic possibilities are underwritten by authoritarianism?
www.nybooks.com
November 14, 2025 at 9:19 AM
If you can hear me there,
if this reaches you

@joriegraham.bsky.social, whose words I long to read, in the @lrb.co.uk
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Jorie Graham · Poem: ‘Demonstration’
www.lrb.co.uk
November 13, 2025 at 10:24 PM
"Bourguiba’s prediction proved eerily accurate. Gabes did become unrecognizable, though not in the way he had promised."

@merip.bsky.social
www.merip.org/2025/11/we-w...
'We Want to Breathe'—Dispatch from Gabes, Tunisia
A few weeks into the 2025 school year, in a middle school in Chott Essalem, Tunisia, students began to feel dizzy and light-headed and their throats tightened. Within minutes, they began collapsing, o...
www.merip.org
November 13, 2025 at 9:58 PM
Reposted by Nabil Salih
New: for @equatormag.bsky.social I spent months talking to BBC journalists, from front-line reporters to the former head of the World Service, about how the corporation came unstuck over Gaza. But as I was working on the story, it collided with something... bigger... www.equator.org/articles/ins...
Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco • Articles • EQUATOR
How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart
www.equator.org
November 13, 2025 at 2:50 PM
On Beirut in @artreview.bsky.social, a story similar to Baghdad's, where development hardly meets resistance, serving the butchers-cum-elites to enforce amnesia, exorcise the ghost Saddam Hussein, and erect a city over a city in their own name, murdering histories.
artreview.com/restorative-...
‘Restorative Justice’: Beirut’s Struggle with Truth
Heritage in Lebanon is not just about aesthetics; it is about truth
artreview.com
November 10, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Much is being written on Tuesday's elections in Iraq, most is lazy and flawed, failing to grasp the gravity of the situation. Some parachute from Doha and New York and readily volunteer as propagandists for al-Sudani and the state. Independents are unheard of; locals on mute. A stain on journalism.
November 7, 2025 at 10:09 PM
"Sooner or later he has to fall down to earth."

On Reichardt's 'The Mastermind' in @nybooks.com
www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...
Making Up an Escape | Alex Ransom
Since her career began in the mid-1990s, Kelly Reichardt has directed nine feature films, all modest in scope and budget and often willfully disinterested
www.nybooks.com
November 6, 2025 at 12:04 PM
Yash Sheth's photographs in the current, monumental issue of @grantamag.bsky.social, beautifully introduced by Ruchir Joshi.
granta.com/come-rain-co...
Come Rain, Come Down
‘It feels as though Bombay has invented rain for itself.’ Yash Sheth’s photography from Mumbais monsoon season, introduced by Ruchir Joshi.
granta.com
November 6, 2025 at 11:59 AM
Long before occupying Baghdad, as defense secretary, Dick Cheney, now deceased former vice president, defended the bombing of al-Amiriyah Bomb Shelter, where my great aunt and her children were incinerated at dawn in 1991. If there is hell, that's where he is going tonight. Waiting for Bush!
November 4, 2025 at 1:49 PM
"Memories of life in Iraq remain foundational to Sami’s art. But with each measured allusion to Saddam-era tyranny or regime-change turmoil, we detect an anxious impulse to withhold, mask, or deflect."

@artforum.com
www.artforum.com/events/moham...
Mohammed Sami
Declan Long covers Mohammed Sami’s “To Whom it May Concern” at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, where the Iraqi artist’s work depicts communication methods in a state of limbo.
www.artforum.com
November 1, 2025 at 10:57 AM