Iona Italia

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Me: 🇮🇳🇬🇧 🇦🇷 Parsi 🔥 Managing Editor @Quillette Formerly @areomagazine Writes @SubstackInc Pun police, gymnosophist, chess, tango, dogs ❤️ Pro-🇮🇱 & 🇺🇦

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Articles

Podcast #254: In Defence of Beauty

Oct 8, 2024 | quillette.com | Robert Thornett |Oscar Clarke |John Aziz |Iona Italia

Introduction: My guest this week is Megan Gafford. Megan is an artist, teacher, and writer. She publishes visual essays on her Substack “Fashionably Late Takes.” She is also a frequent contributor to Quillette.
Searching for Presidential Rhetoric

Oct 8, 2024 | quillette.com | Robert Thornett |Oscar Clarke |John Aziz |Iona Italia

“Civility prevails,” read the headline of the Spanish newspaper El País. “Walz and Vance embrace an endangered species: agreement,” reported the Guardian. Such responses to the recent US vice-presidential debate between Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Walz were a world away from those that followed the bitter Trump–Biden and Trump–Harris debates in the preceding months.
Towards a Post-Hamas Future

Oct 7, 2024 | quillette.com | John Aziz |Iona Italia |Benny Morris |Ari Gandsman

A sad memory from the evening of 6 October 2023 is stuck in the back of my mind, and often trickles back into the forefront of my thoughts when I think about the ongoing spasms of war between Israel and Hamas and the resulting death and destruction in Gaza.
The Women of 7 October

Oct 7, 2024 | quillette.com | Iona Italia |Benny Morris |Ari Gandsman |Meghan Murphy

Editor’s Note: The following piece was first published in my Substack, The Second Swim on 18 November 2023 and is reprinted here in commemoration of the women who died on that day and lest we forget those who continue to suffer.—Iona ItaliaI can’t stop thinking about them: the women and girls of the Israeli kibbutzim, who were raped on 7 October, less than 8 weeks ago. Raped so brutally and so repeatedly that in some cases their pelvises broke from the weight of so many men.
Storm Warnings in the West Pacific

Sep 30, 2024 | quillette.com | Aaron Sarin |Brian Stewart |David Cohen |Iona Italia

The tiny Pacific island of Guam sits just off the lip of the Mariana Trench, a fissure in the sea bed that plunges to the hadal depth of 36,000 feet (around 10,973 metres)—deeper than any other part of the world’s oceans. Guam also lies on the eastern edge of the modern world’s most perilous geopolitical zone, where unstable nuclear powers and multiple flashpoints could soon cause the entire region to fall into the abyss of war.
A Measure of Justice in Beirut

Sep 29, 2024 | quillette.com | Brian Stewart |David Cohen |Iona Italia |Holly Lawford-Smith

The military response was late, but when it finally arrived, it hit the target. On 27 September, an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut bunker eliminated Hezbollah’s general secretary Hassan Nasrallah. This operation was the boldest stroke yet in an Israeli campaign that began ten days before with the detonation of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah’s operatives, continued with the targeting of the group’s senior military leaders, and has now decapitated the organisation entirely.
Misinformation Is Bad. Prohibiting It Is Worse

Sep 29, 2024 | quillette.com | David Cohen |Iona Italia |Holly Lawford-Smith |Benny Morris

On 19 February 2020, just three weeks after the World Health Organisation (WHO) had declared COVID-19 an international public-health emergency, a group of 27 prominent scientists published a letter in the Lancet headlined, Statement in Support of the Scientists, Public Health Professionals, and Medical Professionals of China Combating COVID-19.
Talking Nick Cave Blues

Sep 27, 2024 | quillette.com | David Cohen |Iona Italia |Holly Lawford-Smith |Benny Morris

It is probably fitting that the academic I contacted to discuss Nick Cave was Tanya Dalziell, a professor of English and cultural studies at the University of Western Australia, in Perth. For nearly 45 years now, her charcoal-voiced fellow countryman—besuited in black and proffering bouquets of flowers from the pit—has been offering us songs of love and hate.
Stoicism: A Life-Changing Philosophy

Sep 26, 2024 | quillette.com | Iona Italia |Holly Lawford-Smith |Benny Morris |Dennis Saffran

Editor’s Note: Back in 2019, I felt that my life had become increasingly financially precarious and spiritually empty and I fell into a deep well of regret and self-reproach. I was brooding obsessively over what I saw as the mistakes and missed opportunities of my past and was consumed by anxiety about the future. It was the discovery of Stoicism—largely through Derren Brown’s work (see below)—that, together with the love of friends, helped me out of it.
I Blew Up My Lucrative Public-Service Career (And So Can You)

Sep 15, 2024 | quillette.com | Nick Osmond-Jones |John Aziz |Iona Italia |Benny Morris

My last day as an investigator with the British Columbia Office of the Ombudsperson started unremarkably. I rode a skateboard to my office in the heart of downtown Victoria and climbed the stairs to the sixth floor with its stunning views across the strait of Juan de Fuca to the Olympic Mountains in Washington state. I exchanged pleasantries with coworkers, settled into my office, and got to work investigating complaints about allegedly unfair practices committed by B.C. provincial employees.