This year, I wasn’t pepper sprayed by German cops, didn’t go viral with any open letters from Jewish intellectuals, didn’t complete any residencies or long reporting trips or embark on any adventures of endurance. It was a quiet turn. I greeted 2024 inside Berghain, vacationed in Athens, visited family in Seattle. I turned 39. I gave a talk in Armenia and moved part-time to Cleveland for a teaching job. Bought a car. Hosted my final events for a while in Berlin (with Lauren Oyler and Sarah Schulman). I read Gary Indiana, Cynthia Ozick, Isaac Bashavis Singer, and Elaine Scarry, plus many student essays. I wrote a lot of words that will not see daylight for a couple years. Now I’m in San Francisco, where I’ll welcome the new year at the wedding of two friends, after which I’ll log off from most of the internet for a while.
In 2024, I completed a full first draft of my book, which once seemed a distant dream. There’s still a lot of work left to do but it’s drafted and someday you’ll be able to read it. Long-time readers know that this project was sold on proposal before Covid-19 and has been slow in the making (some countries—Syria, China—are very different today than they were when I visited). I chalk some of the delay up to my ignorance and youthful ambition, but I have no major regrets, and the unvarnished truth is that good first books take a long, long time.
And after more than a decade as a full-time freelancer, I joined the English department at Case Western Reserve University. My experience getting institutionalized has been positive, if not ambivalence-free. It was certainly an offer we couldn’t refuse: a tenured position with a reasonable teaching load promising liberties and support for my writing, and the ability to divide our time between Berlin and Cleveland. All that has proved to be true, and I’ve enjoyed my students and colleagues without exception, which I know is a rarity. At the same time, the move was all-consuming and I had much less time to write this year than I’d hoped at a moment when writing is what I really want to be doing. I’m hopeful next semester will prove easier to manage. Cleveland is as everyone here says it is: pleasant, livable, nice.
Finally, in 2024 I was a New America National Fellow and an NEH Public Scholar. I recommend both programs, which gave me the time and financial freedom to finish a book draft.
Publications
(1) “The Long Road from Xinjiang,” The New York Times Magazine
This November, Nyrola Elimä and I published a major investigation in The New York Times Magazine. “The Long Road from Xinjiang” follows an undocumented Uyghur religious scholar’s journey out of China and across Asia, in and out of detention, in search of safe harbor. Along the way, our story describes a mass exodus of thousands of Uyghur asylum seekers, highlighting some of the most egregious cases of indefinite detention in the world and showing in unprecedented detail the lengths to which China will go to pursue Uyghurs across borders.
Our reporting has led to calls to action by IPAC and has been highlighted by Thai politicians and in newspapers like The Independent and The New Humanitarian, among others. The story made the Financial Times’ Best of 2024 reading list and was a favorite of The Sunday Long Read newsletter. (Recently, Nyrola and I went on a podcast hosted by two genocide scholars, Not to Forgive, But to Understand, to discuss our reporting.)
As I described in my previous newsletter, this was the most significant and consuming reporting project I’ve ever been involved with. We’ve been working on the story for two years in multiple countries and languages, with significant bouts of reporting in Thailand and Turkey. I’m not sure I’ll ever do anything like it again. I think the structural incentives and support that once existed for this kind of ambitious narrative journalism have pretty much disappeared. But I’m proud of our collaboration and hope you will read it.
(2) “James C. Scott, the Ambivalent Anarchist,” The Nation
For The Nation, I considered the legacy of James C. Scott, a major figure in political science and anthropology who died this year, and who is also a kind of patron saint of left libertarians. It was a pleasure to return to Scott’s work as I lay the theoretical groundwork for my own book—certainly, Scott is a big influence on The Fugitive World. In the essay, I tried to situate Scott’s work within his politics (which are not what they seem, or not as they are reputed to be).
(3) “Facing Ourselves,” a conversation with Sarah Schulman, The Diasporist
In the spring, I organized two events in Berlin with the writer Sarah Schulman. They included a reading for Let the Record Show and a screening of United in Anger, a book and film, respectively, dealing with the legacy of ACT UP New York. But the events were also significant in their frank discussion of Palestine solidarity at a time when Germany’s entire political and media ecosystem was busy working to suppress all criticism of Israel. Finding venues and collaborators to host these events was not easy; it is hard to describe to outsiders how chilled the atmosphere in Berlin has become for critics of the war.
Schulman is an intellectual hero of mine (I taught Let the Record Show this fall) and it was an honor to discuss movement strategy, AIDS activism, Palestine solidarity, and BDS with her. I’m glad to have an abridged record of our conversation in a cool new publication started by some friends of mine. Check it out.
(4) Newsletters
After falling off in the first part of the year, I returned to this newsletter in July. I wrote about my new job and teaching journalism, writing I’ve enjoyed, reading Dante during a genocide, reporting in Syria (a short excerpt from my book), and reporting on Uyghurs in exile. I’ll hope to be at least as productive in 2025. Expect more of the same: no brand management, bad audience engagement, and occasional posts about whatever I feel like. Happy New Year.
xo
Ben
Congratulations on the job, the move and the draft. Huge stuff.