{"id":754,"date":"2026-09-14T16:59:54","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T20:59:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/?p=754"},"modified":"2026-09-14T16:59:54","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T20:59:54","slug":"reading-blog-week-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/reading-blog-week-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Blog Week 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2021, shortly after the last American plane left Kabul, I found myself working on a desolate stretch of New Mexico desert somewhere between Fort Bliss and White Sands Missile Range. Over ten thousand Afghan refugees were living in a temporary settlement that had been thrown up in just a few weeks. The area had until recently been used as a training range for artillery and small arms. Wind lifted the dusty ground and turned over scattered piles of spent ammunition. Hundreds of diesel generators roared day and night. Black Hawks tore low across the sky. The port-a-potties baked in the sun, overflowing into lagoons of waste that dried into twenty-foot wafers, and I wrote reports about it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We were instructed to only call them guests<\/i>. Not refugees, or asylum seekers, or Afghans.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Soldiers and contractors told me about the opium rings and the child marriages supposedly running in the tents, though nobody seemed to have actually witnessed any of it. Most of the guests had been doctors, lawyers, translators, government officials. Now, they were just foreigners in tents. Maybe the rumors made the conditions easier to stomach.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In The New Arab\u2019s article, the first talk of Syrians going home from Germany came within hours after Assad\u2019s fall. Alice Weidel posted that anybody celebrating a free Syria on a street in Berlin “evidently no longer has a reason to flee.” Bavaria\u2019s interior minister put it more graciously: the well-integrated remain welcome, while the rest should be helped back.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Three months later, the Washington Post counted some 6,000 Syrian doctors propping up German hospitals, and the same ministry that had suspended asylum decisions was warning that whole areas of the health sector were dependent on these Syrians.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Kingsley offers a more intimate and striking view of the machinery that refugees must navigate. The New Odyssey<\/i> opens with Hashem al-Souki in a smuggler’s boat on the night of his son’s birthday, unable to see the people around him and able only to hear them.<\/p>\n

Loubna Mrie ends up inside the machinery from the other side. Months after her mother is disappeared by her own father’s men, she is flown to a donor-funded “civil society workshop” in an Istanbul hotel. She realizes she was invited because she is Alawite \u2014 exactly what the donors wanted to see. She is not there to be taught. She is there as evidence that the intervention is working.<\/p>\n

I wrote environmental inspection reports, and I understood who they were for.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2021, shortly after the last American plane left Kabul, I found myself working on a desolate stretch of New Mexico desert somewhere between Fort Bliss and White Sands Missile Range. Over ten thousand Afghan refugees were living in a temporary settlement that had been thrown up in just a few weeks. The area had<\/p>\n

Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7982,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7982"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=754"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":755,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions\/755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}