There is an orange street light by my window that reminds me of you. I can only ever see it halfway through, even when I stretch, even when I strain to catch its intricacies, its shadows— the stray cat that drifts past now and then. I am a liar; I think of you when I see the sun, when the day slips by, when the city is swallowed by darkness, when my mother says it is useless to cry for something that never was. The orange street light is a cheap imitation. It remi

We are living in a moment when the language of terrorism and extremism is stretching far beyond violence. These terms now shape how states discipline, how they define the boundaries of acceptable speech, and how they manage social life. Their power comes not from precision, but from the way they slip into everyday routines and decisions. I was fifteen when gunfire echoed through my hometown of Kumanovo, near the Serbian border. It was May 2015. The government called it a terr

Tashkent is not a city that shouts. It hums softly in the blue domes of its madrasas, the symmetry of its courtyards, the warmth of its doors opening to strangers. You don’t fall in love with it all at once; the affection grows slowly, like steam rising from a plate of plov in the late afternoon. I came to Tashkent to speak at the Academic Freedom in Flux: Purpose, Beneficiaries, and Practices in the Contemporary World conference at Tashkent State University of Economics (TS