“There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first… — Omar El Akkad Copy Share Image
“There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one’s capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way, be understood – only felt, only moved through. And sometimes that… — Omar El Akkad Copy Share Image
“Beyond relief and recognition, there is a more complicated thing--an understanding that the machinery of the West has never had much of a capacity… — Omar El Akkad Copy Share Image
“Interviewing one of Uber’s earliest executives, who demonstrated the company’s route-finding algorithms with the unbridled enthusiasm of a small child at Christmas, I couldn’t… — Omar El Akkad Copy Share Image
“In a 2016 essay, the writer and former soldier Roy Scranton describes watching Star Wars while stationed in Baghdad. He is forced in that… — Omar El Akkad Copy Share Image
“All these old men want it to be like it was when they were young. But it'll never be like that again, and they'll… — Omar El Akkad Copy Share Image
“It amazed her, the length at which old men could talk. She wondered if it wasn't the sound of his own voice, rather than… — Omar El Akkad Copy Share Image
“You have to grow up, Sarat. You’re not a little girl anymore. Look, just try not to give anybody reason to make fun of… — Omar El Akkad Copy Share Image
“Your side fought the war, but the war never happened to you. In the Red country the war happened.” — Omar El Akkad Copy Share Image
“She wondered if all boys were like this, their meanness a self defense.” — Omar El Akkad Copy Share Image
“It's not surprising, I don't think, that in the midst of this indiscriminate killing, many of the Westerners doing the most active work in… — Omar El Akkad Copy Share Image
“You got the sense from being around them that no war in the history of South Carolina had ever ended, that they were still… — Omar El Akkad Copy Share Image
“Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.” — Omar El Akkad Copy Share Image
