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Part travelogue, part global news brief, Hidden Cities is a new magazine that illuminates the world.
Edited by @freddydek

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“I still have a home here—in Aleppo, in Syria—even if it’s a skeleton that we are slowly putting flesh back on.”

Alhakam Shaar on returning to Aleppo after years of exile and war, and what it means to finally see what was lost and what can still be rebuilt. @alhamsterling

“We’ll be back. We’re home, after all.”

Read the full essay at the link in our bio. by @hiddencitiesmag

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a day ago

“The Translator’s Betrayal,” a new poem from Gaza by Mohammed Abu Lebda @mohd_lebda96

Mohammed Abu Lebda is a Palestinian poet and translator from Rafah. His poetry has been published in Democracy in Exile, the journal of @dawnmenaorg, and he has spoken about life under siege in interviews with NPR’s Here & Now and Democracy Now!. He continues to write from Gaza.

Read the full poem at the link in our bio. by @hiddencitiesmag

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4 days ago

“Despite the historical rupture delivered by the astonishing implosion of the Assad regime, in many ways the debates in Syria of the 2020s resonated with the same set of challenges that earlier generations of Syrians had also faced.”

Historian Daniel Neep on the Assad regime in the years before its sudden fall — a hollowed-out regime “riddled with contradictions” — and how the challenges and questions Syrians face today after Assad echo with Syria’s longer history. Adapted from his book Syria: A Modern History published by @basicbooks @neepd

Read Neep’s new essay at the link in our bio. by @hiddencitiesmag

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17 days ago

New poetry in Hidden Cities by Raed Shomar, a Palestinian writer and poet from Gaza.

Raed describes his work as “looking beyond war as an event to examine its quiet, lasting impact on everyday life.”

Read his poem “When the City Falls Asleep” — his first poem to appear in English — at the link in our bio. by @hiddencitiesmag

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19 days ago

“Much has changed since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and much has not,” @alexgsimon1 writes in a new essay in Hidden Cities on the hopes, fears, ambiguities, and contradictions in Syria after Assad — adapted from his new book Syrians in the Shadow of War from @auc_press

The book draws on years of research and fieldwork in Syria by @synapsnetwork, including the social and economic decay that preceded the Assad regime’s collapse.

“The challenges Syria now faces, and the resources it brings to bear in tackling them, are years and decades in the making. A starting point is to reckon with that legacy.”

Read the essay at the link in our bio.

Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images by @hiddencitiesmag

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a month ago

“To hear these tech oligarchs tell it, the Saudi regime was hardly one of the most repressive governments on the planet. It was, instead, a potential model of the future.” @caseyjcmichel on American oligarchs’ infatuation with Saudi Arabia — not just the kingdom’s billions, but the vision it represents.

It is a cautionary tale of how a pariah regime can buy its way back into America’s good graces — and what many of these American tech oligarchs actually want. From his new book UNITED STATES OF OLIGARCHY out now from @stmartinspress

Read the full essay at the link in our bio. by @hiddencitiesmag

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a month ago

“What happened to the people of Gaza who survived the genocide? Is it even right that we consider them survivors? Where does human pain go when justice is absent?”

A haunting essay by @samar_yazbek in Hidden Cities from her harrowing new book, “Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza,” translated by Leri Price and published this week by @otherpress

As Yazbek writes of the hundreds of Palestinians she met, ”these survivors are here; despite everything, they are living, in every sense of the word—with their questions, with their wish to understand what has happened to them, with their inability to understand. They are people who have passed through hell and returned.”

For Yazbek, Gaza’s genocide evokes the horrors she witnessed and endured in Syria, and the way that mass violence destroys meaning itself—what she describes as “the interwoven scenes of ruin, the confusion between which was Syria and which Palestine.”

Samar Yazbek is an acclaimed Syrian writer, novelist, and journalist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Read her essay on giving voice to Gaza’s survivors at the link in our bio. by @hiddencitiesmag

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a month ago

@aaronmagid has written the first comprehensive biography of Jordan’s King Abdullah II. In his new essay for Hidden Cities, he takes stock of this “most American king.” The Western-backed monarch’s purported commitment to political liberalization doesn’t match reality for Jordanians under his long rule.

“While Abdullah enthusiastically promoted Jordanian political participation, his actions on the ground showed a different picture”—from journalists harassed and detained, to political activists and oppositions politicians arrested.

Read the full essay at the link in our bio. by @hiddencitiesmag

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2 months ago

New poetry in Hidden Cities, by Mohammed Abu Lebda in Gaza.

Mohammed Abu Lebda is a Palestinian poet and translator from Rafah. His poetry has been published in Democracy in Exile, the journal of @dawnmenaorg, and he has spoken about life under siege in interviews with NPR’s Here & Now and Democracy Now!. He continues to write from Gaza. @mohd_lebda96

Read the full poem at the link in our bio. by @hiddencitiesmag

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2 months ago

Iran’s heightened tolerance for risk is one way of understanding its chokehold on Hormuz. A battered regime believes it has nothing to lose and everything to gain by controlling the strait, as Ben Soodavar writes in Hidden Cities.

“Effective deterrence presumes an adversary weighing what it stands to lose. But against a regime that believes it has already lost, each strike simply deepens the deficit it is gambling to recover. The fight is now being waged on ground that Tehran has defined.” @theconversationdotcom by @hiddencitiesmag

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2 months ago

Robin Yassin-Kassab on returning to a Syria in ruins and what the rubble reveals — from his new book “The Blood Between Us: Syria After the Fall of Assad,” recently published by @saqibooks

“We continued through crumpled residential blocks and flat fields of rubble to the next ex-settlement, Irbeen. Some of these areas had been destroyed by bombing. Others had been destroyed first by bombs, and then bulldozed to make it entirely impossible for anyone to return. But someone had painted on an intact bit of wall the words Eid bil-eid n’amara min jadeed, or Hand in Hand We’ll Build It Anew.”

Read the full essay at the link in our bio. by @hiddencitiesmag

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3 months ago

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3 months ago