STORIES, STORIES

Making (Radio?) Waves by Nessreen It’s Sunday, the sun is shining painfully bright through my window and falls right on my bed, where I have thrown my laundry. I’m sorting through my clothes thousands of miles away from Jeddah, here in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, and I’m laughing into a freshly laundered shirt.  Listening to The Low Priority Que (The LPQ).  “And where the hell was Ghost this whole time?” Hakeem says, outraged, in the middle of a discussion about -SPOILER- Jon Snow’s demise on Game of Thrones. “Sam gets in a minor scuffle and mashallah Ghost is there to save him, but while his master was getting shanked by his own people, where was this Ghost direwolf?”  “He was probably up there on the wall, heard Jon Snow was in trouble, looked around and thought, Uff meshwar ,” says Tamim .  Well, never mind that I bungled the transcription of that sound clip (you can listen to it yourself and point out where I made mistakes right here ), and never min...

IN SEARCH OF THE ARC by Kathryn Narciso She takes a long, deep drag off her cigarette, stares a hole through me, and blows tendrils of cloud into the air between us. What is he? she interrupts my pitch. It’s like telling the story of Jesus in two sentences, and just as I have crucified him all over again, the blood red-lipped evangelist goes back to the major character’s obsession. She blows a split second smoke in my face again. He is…   She exhales another.  I watch it curl up in the air and disappear into everywhere. He is a carpenter? Except he’s not. If I were really telling the story of Jesus, I would have not seen her eyes narrowed at the unsure tone of my voice. You didn’t watch it. But I did, I approached her cautiously. I just can’t remember. Perhaps teased by her own sneaking suspicion, she smiles at me. No, you didn’t watch it. I really did. Let me tell you another story. FIRST ACT Against her genius, ready to prey on any si...

You guys. I turn 32 today. My first order of business at this new age is to reinforce (to myself) my worth as a person by doing my best at what I do, which currently is my job, as a publishing manager slash editor slash publication writer slash proofreader. And I do that while sitting at the Media Room of the Putrajaya International Convention Centre (PICC) here in Malaysia, where my editorial team and I are covering a 3-day event – the International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) 2015 . All around me are journalists, activists, government officials, NGO members and start-up CEOs who are crazy serious about transparency and fighting corruption. They are angry, driven, impassioned as they discuss, debate, step around and propose actions on the topic of promoting integrity in all aspects of their professional and personal lives. IACC Chairman Akere Muna wears a bow tie. Bow ties are cool. The all-female panel moderated by Jess Search (in blue), Chief Executive at ...

One time in my parent’s home in Jeddah, while digitizing our old family photos, I stopped to really look at my parents and their faces. Both he and my mother had the good looks of the young and privileged, the strong features that would aid in their graceful aging in the years to come – prominent cheekbones, jawlines, distinct eyebrows, unobtrusive noses, eyelashes for miles, svelte frames. What beautiful people they were from a relatively objective point of view.  I envied them this, and once afterwards had a conversation with my father – one of many that we have – that led to a discussion of physical appearances. Being an artist in every sense of the word (he paints, he sketches, he produces art installations and professional photography, he writes, and he mixes all media), it was inevitable that I would be curious (as an adult) about his take on human attractiveness. After all, he is in the business of finding beauty. This was an online conversation a few months ago, a...