January 6, 2026 On Things Thirteen Waters: Tasting Notes from a Sommelier By Amalia Ulman All photographs courtesy of the author. My water journey began on the airplane, when I recognized a bottle of Elisabethen Quelle. I remembered this brand from my time at the Doemens water sommelier school in Gräfelfing. It’s a mainstream still water of medium mineralization with a slightly salty taste. There’s something comforting about this water, maybe because of its high hydrogen carbonate content, which aids digestion. I usually get a tummy ache when I fly, so I can vouch for its curative effects. Elisabethen Quelle Rating: ★★★★☆ mg/L Sodium: 15.3 Magnesium: 28.3 Calcium: 96.9 Chloride: 12 Sulfates: 3 Hydrogen carbonate: 431 When I asked the flight attendant if I could take a photograph of the bottle, she asked why. I told her that I’m a water sommelier, and she said, “What’s that?” and I said, “Like a wine sommelier, but for water.” “I don’t know what a wine sommelier is.” Not knowing how to answer, I walked back to my seat and continued watching Dirty Harry. Read More
January 5, 2026 Bookmarks The Great Empty Cup of Attention By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor From Jérémie Koering’s Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images (Zone Books), translated from the French by Nicholas Huckle, a description of the Egyptian Statue of the Healer Djedhor (320 B.C.E.): The statue includes a wide variety of magical, biographical, and dedicatory inscriptions, and we find a dual system of basins carved into its plinth. The first of these, running around the main figure, allowed for the collection of water poured over both it and the stela, while the second, sculpted deeper and connected to the first by a channel, formed a sort of reservoir into which a container might be dipped. The two basins were clearly intended to be the statue’s magico-medical end point. From evidence pointed out by Lacau, we can see that the object was intended primarily for a procedure of “washing” rather than for reading. … The magical inscriptions are generally positioned so as to face the healer figure, notably so with the second basin, in such a way that they appear intended to be read not so much by the officiating priest, but rather by the statue itself. … The artifact was principally activated by the running of the water that the sick person, or an intermediary, would then draw from the basin. The liquid poured over the surface of the object is a substitute, therefore, for the ritual of incantation. But how are we to understand this piece of legerdemain? What could authorize such a slippage? It is hard to believe that the invocation, whose importance is so well known in ancient Egyptian culture, might have been entirely sidelined, at least conceptually. The solution is most likely to be found in the analogy one could make between the act of reading and the running water. The contact and the movement of the water were possibly likened to the experience of reading: the physical action of the water, running from top to bottom and adapting itself to all the reliefs and hollows of the engraved object, must have seemed equivalent to the work of the reader’s eyes, moving down the sculpture from the top to the base, activating the magical potential of the written story. … The liquid, as it is poured over his body and over the stela of Horus, might be likened to the flow of a murmured voice. Essentially, the water would be called upon to activate an always possible, potential reading. … The water running over the stela carries out a process that reading aloud is unable to achieve, mixing image and text in a flow that makes no distinction between these two material parts of the object. It gathers the trace of the images and writing into a material, dynamic, and continuous substance, creating thus a remedy that, still active and in motion, could then be taken and given to the sick person. Read More
January 2, 2026 Poetry “Gaza—the stadium of the soul” and Other Poems By The Paris Review NIGHTFALL (AFTER ASIMOV AND EMERSON) (4), 2017, CYANOTYPE EXPOSED BY STARLIGHT ON FOUND BOOK PAGE, 9 1/10 X 5 9/10 IN. COURTESY OF ALA EBTEKAR AND THE THIRD LINE. FROM OUR WINTER 2024 ISSUE. “I’d been angry for a while, and confused about what to do, and as soon as I was decided, I felt a relief,” Alice Oswald told Rachael Allen in our Art of Poetry interview in the new Winter issue. Oswald had decided to join more than five hundred protesters in London’s Parliament Square in August in support of Palestine Action, which the British government had designated a terrorist group. British police arrested Oswald, as she had expected and planned for, though her only previous interaction with the law had been “occasionally break[ing] the speed limit.” At the time, Oswald was mentoring young Palestinian poets through the Hands Up Project, a charity set up by Nick Bilbrough. Being involved in these young poets’ lives, Oswald said, made it impossible not to act. She worked with five others—two of whom worked with students in Arabic and three of whom helped them write in English—to mentor thirteen teenage students. “Some students had already been evacuated to Cairo, some were in the West Bank; others were surviving in tents or half ruined buildings in Gaza,” she told us in an email. “There were times when hunger, bereavement, displacement or lack of internet made it impossible to meet up. On these occasions, mentors exchanged poems intermittently through WhatsApp or voice messages.” Still, they tried to get together as a group at least once a month, and shared a Google Doc of their poems so they could read each other’s work. Rebecca Ruth Gould, a professor at SOAS University of London, invited the Hands Up Project to collaborate on a book called From Dust We Rise: New Poetry from Palestine, which collects the work of these Palestinian poets. The Review is publishing several of their poems here. These poems, Oswald said, are “an astonishing record not only of the darkness we have all been through, but also of human dignity, courage, patience, and recovery.” Gaza—the stadium of the soul by Bassim Helmi Hijazi (twenty years old) On a land choked with blood, there lies a field with no green grass its soil the ashes of shattered homes. The touchlines are not drawn in white chalk but in the tears of mothers. The two goalposts, a child who lost his arms and a father searching for the scent of his child beneath the stones. Read More
January 1, 2026 First Person Happy New Year By Laurie Stone Fireworks in Eberhardzell, 2018. Photograph by Andreas Weith. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. When I met Richard, he said, “I’m not a Cartesian. I feel no division between my body and my mind. I don’t even think my mind is confined to my brain. I think it’s everywhere in my body and even outside me.” I said, “Me too.” That was nineteen years ago. He said, “The right hand can’t give the left hand a gift.” I thought it could, although maybe you would need to be an octopus. He said, “You can’t jump into the same river once.” That was obvious. On New Year’s Eve, you look backward and forward at the same time. Time stops, and you are in the now. You make resolutions you can’t keep—on purpose. You promise to be reborn, but you like your funk. And it’s so much easier to let yourself down than to let down another person. Richard says, “Every promise invites a change of heart,” and when he says this I feel a wave of love for him rise up, or a wave of love for the human mind and the pleasure it takes in maintaining its shape. I’m making Richard sound like the wooden fortune teller in the penny arcade, where you slip a coin into a slot and she spits out a fortune-cookie saying. This is a compliment to Richard. The fortune teller knew a thing or two. Every promise of course invites a change of heart. Last year, when we got married, we promised nothing. Read More
December 22, 2025 Diaries Dream Diary By J. D. Daniels Dickens’s Dream, unfinished painting by Robert W. Buss, 1875. Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Dream. All global financial markets have been crashed by a computer worm called the “Be Interesting” virus. Dream. A long argument with J. D. Vance about clearance to fly on an airplane. Smoking grass with him and typing information on a medical certificate. — I hate dreaming of people named J. D. Dream. A song. “Doesn’t anybody here remember I’m alive?” Dream. I die and am reunited with my dead uncle Billy Joe. He is glad to see me but he can’t remember my name. I don’t care. The important thing is we are together again. I press my forehead against his. Dream. “We don’t need the code. We have the code.” Dream. My house was full of rats, snakes that ate the rats, and hawks and three eagles that ate the snakes. Dream. A song. “You can utilize us, come what may.” Dream. A song. “The dragon sleeps no more.” Dream. Everyone I knew assembled to tell me the world would have been a better place if I had never been born. Read More
December 19, 2025 First Person Nobody Loves Anyone as Much as Adelaide Faith Loves Caveh Zahedi By Adelaide Faith and Caveh Zahedi Photograph courtesy of Adelaide Faith. CAVEH Ever since I was five years old, I’ve been obsessed with finding a romantic partner. I believe that the purpose of life is to join with others and my main goal in life has always been to find a life partner. Unfortunately, this quest has proven elusive and I have been divorced three times. After my last divorce, at the age of fifty-seven, I found myself dating mostly twentysomethings, not because I was especially drawn to twentysomethings but because they were the only ones who seemed drawn to me. My last several girlfriends all approached me as fans after a film screening or messaged me on Instagram. They’ve been the only ones who have seemed interested. ADELAIDE I hadn’t had a boyfriend for eight and a half years. In all that time I’d only had two dates. They were both with the same person, but they were a girl on the first date and a boy on the second. I found that interesting, but nothing else about them. On the first date they told me they liked to wear odd socks. Between dates they sent me a selfie with a sock on each ear. I don’t know why I agreed to the second date. It was something to do, and maybe I wanted to experience not being the needy one for once. Maybe I thought I’d enjoy acting cold, but I didn’t enjoy it at all. It was easy to get rid of them in the end. I told them I didn’t believe in romance. “I don’t think anybody really loves anybody,” I said toward the end of the second date. “They just pretend they do to secure backup. They want someone on their side in case they’re struck down by misfortune.” I believed that was true at the time. CAVEH After my breakup with Kathy, who had been twenty-four when I met her and twenty-seven when we broke up, I was lonely and single again. I was more famous than I’d ever been, so getting laid was a little easier than it used to be, but not by much. After a few demoralizing one-night stands, I met Kate, who was also twenty-seven. She emailed me asking if I could teach her how to appreciate poetry. I googled her. She was cute. So I offered to meet her over Zoom and read through a poem together. My main motivation was romantic. But I wanted to meet over Zoom because I was worried that (1) she might be crazy (I attract a lot of them), or (2) that I was projecting my own desires onto her. But I enjoy close readings of poems, so I figured the worst that could happen was that I deepen my knowledge of poetry. ADELAIDE It was hard to find anyone I was interested in. My capacity for being interested in someone had been absorbed by my therapist for so many years, and this had been all projection. Since I wasn’t able to get to know her, she couldn’t fall short of my ideal. Whenever I told a friend I’d been single for eight years they acted like I must be mistaken. It seemed an impossibility to them, just unthinkable. But what did they mean? Was there some specific practical thing they would have done that I hadn’t, which would have prevented my being single? Or did they think interesting people had been appearing right under my nose but I’d refused to really see them? Nobody had interested me in all those years. I’m sure my friends could easily imagine experiencing one single day of not meeting anyone they wanted to date, so why not three thousand consecutive days? That’s what had happened to me. Read More