On June 10, 2014, the city of Mosul—Iraq’s second largest, home to nearly two million people, built on and around the ruins of the Assyrian capital Nineveh—fell to the Islamic State in a single night. The Iraqi Army dissolved. Soldiers abandoned their uniforms in the streets. By morning, a city that had been continuously inhabited for seven thousand years belonged to a force that intended to abolish everything it had been.

I was inside the city when it fell. I am a historian. When ISIS took Mosul, I made a choice that would define the next three years of my life and reshape everything I understood about myself. I stayed. I documented. I refused to let the occupiers become the sole authors of what was happening to my city.

What followed—what I built, what I carried, what I lost, and what it did to me—is this book.

It is not a policy analysis, though it contains evidence that policymakers will need. It is not a military history, though it documents the largest urban battle of the twenty-first century. It is not a spy memoir, though the work it describes required deception, concealment, and the daily possibility of death.

It is the record of a historian who was compelled by the fall of his city to become something he had never intended to be. I have written it because the record demands it. Because the dead deserve to be counted by someone who knew them as people, not as categories. And because someone should say, clearly and without evasion, what it costs a human being to carry a city’s truth through three years of terror and come out the other side uncertain whether the man who came out is the same man who went in.

Trust no one. Document everything.

That was the rule. This is the book.

—Omar Mohammed

Paris, 2026

(Preface to his book Mosul Eye)

Walking redirects our muddled thoughts. Walking slows us down, and resets our chronometer to the natural speed of life. It helps us to connect with each other in shared conversation, or merely in the silent rhythmic pace. It echoes history and tradition through a most simple movement that has remained “essentially unimproved since the dawn of time.”

Walking? That’s how you keep the barbarians at bay? But… but…, I thought it was Reading, and being Informed, and reminding people that it’s The Year 2026!

Whenever I pick up C. K. Williams’ Repair poems, there are a few that I instinctively flip to. One of them I was just reading the day before reading the Gaskovskis above.

I’ve quoted it before, but this is from his poem “Risk”:

Difficult to know whether humans are inordinately anxious
about crisis, calamity, disaster, or unknowingly crave them. 
These horrific conditionals, these expected unexpecteds,
we dwell on them, flinch, feint, steel ourselves:
but mightn’t our forebodings actually precede anxiety?
Isn’t so much sheer heedfulness emblematic of desire?

How do we come to believe that wrenching ourselves to attention
is the most effective way for dealing with intimations of catastrophe?
Consciousness atremble: might what makes it so
not be the fear of what the future might or might not bring,
but the wish for fear, for concentration, vigilance?
As though life were more convincing resonating like a blade.

“We engorge our little sorrows,” he says, “beat our drums, perform our dances of aversion.” Isn’t that a strange thing about much of our “awareness”? That some of our strictest attention is ultimately an aversion; we use our concentration, our thoughtfulness, in order to avert.

One of the funny things about the ancient sin of sloth is that it has very little to do with laziness as we usually understand it: the hardest working workaholic can be the most slothful person in the world. Slothfulness, acedia, is “a vice of the productive,” says Rebecca DeYoung. “The vice of acedia in its originating context, then, names the monks’ resistance to inner personal transformation (conversio moralis in the Benedictine tradition), as well as the people and practices that foster it. In fact, they would likely raise spiritual concerns about making a virtue out of our diligent busyness or productive activity.”

Humans are good (and bad) at thinking. But nowhere is this ability put to more intense use than when thinking our way out of what ought to be done.

Aquinas, says DeYoung, saw acedia as “aversion to the divine good in us.” (Politically speaking, might it also be aversion to the divine good in others — averting our minds from the always present divine good in all others?) And he saw its opposite, its remedy, not as attention — or not attention per se — but as Sabbath rest.

The final stanza from Williams:

Always, “These gigantic inconceivables.”
Always, “What will have been done to me?”
And so we don our mental armor,
flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.
A violent alertness, the muscularity of risk,
though still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?

I know I have said this before but I’d like to move my attention back in the direction of newsletter writing. There was a time when I easily had time for all of it — working, playing, reading, writing, studying, blogging, hiking, photographing, relaxing. Now, and in many very good ways and for good and natural reasons, not so much.

Probably all digital life inherently succumbs to the fast and superficial, but that doesn’t mean all digital communication is monolithic. There may be some areas where the cons of digital communication are actually outweighed by the pros or, better, where it sufficiently draws on some aspect of the non-digital, the real. (“A record of life lived elsewhere,” to use a phrase I’ve borrowed for this topic before; restoring a self-hijacked visual cortex, to use another. I do like these occasions for being reminded of older posts.)

Regardless of the reasons, I feel my online life has become sporadic and disconnected. And that lack of time I mentioned leaves me striking at almost nothing but lower hanging, less satisfying and less meaningful fruit. One way to reverse this is simply to slow down, to allow more of that non-digital, organic matter to have its effect on this trembling consciousness.

Aside from the usual call to get out and touch grass rake some leaves, it’s not a bad time to adjust my own digital landscape. Importantly, the newsletter thing is for me a way of writing that is, or has certainly felt, closer to the act of walking. And I want more physical, mental, and digital walking.

I am still fairly new to online life, having only started to explore it in 2020. And that began, not a little coincidentally, with this quote from John Ruskin: “It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.”

I am haunted regularly by another line from Ruskin, about how the more we speak of our intentions, the less chance there is of our realizing them. So I say this with great risk, but I’ve had 90% of a newsletter written for the better part of a year now, and I’m hoping to get that sent out before Thanksgiving.

September 2021 — Looking east over Bradley Lake from Garnet Canyon below Middle Teton, Meghan hiking up the trail on the left, looking forward to a short snack break before the rock scramble up the Southwest Couloir. Recycling this from one of the previous posts above. More pictures from that perfect hike here.

Alasdair MacIntyre:

Consider a situation in which someone who comes across a seriously injured or ill or starving stranger, has the resources to provide needed help, and no one else both willing and able to do so is at hand. The stranger’s urgent need provides a sufficient reason for going to her or his aid. Suppose now that a bystander, unwilling her- or himself to give help, asks for a justification of the judgment that the stranger’s need provides a sufficient reason for going to her or his aid. It is one of the marks of the virtues of just generosity that those who possess it are not only disposed to find in someone’s need in such circumstances a sufficient reason for going to her or his aid, but will also be unable to conceive of such a reason as requiring or being open to further justification. To offer or even to request such a justification is itself a sign of defective virtue.

Simone Weil:

Those whom Christ recognized as his benefactors are those whose compassion rested upon the knowledge of affliction. … Those who have not seen the face of affliction, or are not prepared to, can only approach the afflicted behind a veil of illusion or falsehood. … 

The benefactor of Christ, when he meets an afflicted man, does not feel any distance between himself and the other. He projects all his own being into him. It follows that the impulse to give him food is as instinctive and immediate as it is for oneself to eat when one is hungry. And it is forgotten almost at once, just as one forgets yesterday’s meals. Such a man would not think of saying that he takes care of the afflicted for the Lord’s sake; it would seem as absurd to him as it would be to say that he eats for the Lord’s sake. One eats because one can’t help it. Christ will thank the people who give in the way they eat.

These stand alone, but I’m hopefully teeing these up for more on Havel’s letters.

Wilhelm Löhe: “Mission is nothing but the one church of God in its movement—the realization of the one universal, catholic church.”

I don’t know anything about Löhe, but this fits well with one of Stanley Hauerwas’s standard expressions: “The first task of the church is not to make the world more just but to make the world the world.” *

Here’s one expansion on it from Hauerwas:

Put starkly, the first task of the church when it comes to social ethics is to be the church. Such a claim may well sound self-serving or irrelevant until we remember that what makes the church the church is its faithful manifestation of the peaceable kingdom in the world. […] The first social task of the church — the people capable of remembering and telling the story of God we find in Jesus — is to be the church and thus help the world understand itself as the world. The world, to be sure, is God’s world, God’s good creation, which is all the more distorted by sin because it is still bounded by God’s goodness. The church, therefore, is not anti-world, but rather an attempt to show what the world is meant to be as God’s good creation.

And those pair well with Hans Frei when he strongly suggested that the question of modernizing the church or its language is not a problem but an unecessary “conceptual cramp” that the church needs to be released from. 

For me, at least, hovering in the background of all this is something like the peace of, not universalism per se, but a universal hopefulness (e.g. Balthasar) paired with “reverent agnosticism” (e.g. Barth, Hunsinger) and a “holy” or “honorable silence” (e.g. early Greek theologians).

This is not an easy given or a “cheap grace.” You don’t get the true hopefulness without a harsh and joyful seriousness. **

All of which strikes me as the appropriate human stance in regards to desire — for everyone, friends and enemies — and also in knowledge — always limited in scope and justiceability — and therefore also in power.

I don’t necessarily think it requires a universal hopefulness, but it has been increasingly difficult for me to see very well without it. (I also regard it as a practical and on-the-surface liberal but fundamentally and ultimately a conservative impulse. This dynamic is key.)

All this has me thinking about some of those personally essential things — bedrock things that really changed your heart-mind, things you not only come back to over and over but which make up the constantly assumed and relied upon air of any moment.

At some point, I’d like to list and organize some of them.

—

* There are many variations of this from Hauerwas. Here are a few from the second chapter of his book Resident Aliens: “The political task of Christians is to be the church rather than to transform the world.” “The overriding political task of the church is to be the community of the cross.” “The main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.”

In fact, the context of that last one is worth quoting:

Sometime ago, when the United States bombed military and civilian targets in Libya, a debate raged concerning the morality of that act. One of us witnessed an informal gathering of students who argued the morality of the bombing of Libya. Some thought it was immoral, others thought it was moral. At one point in the argument, one of the students turned and said, “Well, preacher, what do you think?”

I said that, as a Christian, I could never support bombing, particularly bombing of civilians, as an ethical act.

“That’s just what we expected you to say,” said another. “That’s typical of you Christians. Always on the high moral ground, aren’t you? You get so upset when a terrorist guns down a little girl in an airport, but when President Reagan tries to set things right, you get indignant when a few Libyans get hurt.”

The assumption seems to be that there are only two political options: Either conservative support of the administration, or liberal condemnation of the administration followed by efforts to let the U.N. handle it.

“You know, you have a point,” I said. “What would be a Christian response to this?” Then I answered, right off the top of my head, “A Christian response might be that tomorrow morning The United Methodist Church announces that it is sending a thousand missionaries to Libya. We have discovered that it is fertile field for the gospel. We know how to send missionaries. Here is at least a traditional Christian response.”

“You can’t do that,” said my adversary.

“Why?” I asked. “You tell me why.”

“Because it’s illegal to travel in Libya. President Reagan will not give you a visa to go there.”

“No! That’s not right,” I said. “I’ll admit that we can’t go to Libya, but not because of President Reagan. We can’t go there because we no longer have a church that produces people who can do something this bold. But we once did.”

We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.

** Not surprisingly, Craig L. Nessan describes Löhe’s five dimensions of “ecclesial theology” as: pietism, confessionalism, liturgical renewal, diakonia, and mission. He quotes Löehe’s Three Books About the Church, and his description of the place of the church in history:

Springing up on Pentecost and Calvary, the church flows through the ages like a river, and that same river and no other will flow unchangingly on through the ages until that great day when it will empty completely into the famed sea of eternal blessedness

Nessan adds: “Loehe entertained a vision of the catholic church through the ages and dared to claim that the Lutheran church, with its confessional clarity, was the fullest expression of that church.” I’ve been struggling with Catholicism, but given how central Gilbert Meilaender has been for me, maybe I’m dispositionally… Lutheran?

Another worthwhile point from Harper:

But I think what you’re getting at, though … Marx talks about capitalism as the icy waters of egotistical calculation that dissolve all traditional boundaries and faith and religion, etc. It’s always worth noting, because I think this is something that always gets lost when people talk about Marx. Marx admired that about capitalism. He admired that it created this profusion of new technologies that have bolstered industry, and he admired too, that it broke down what he saw as religion, which he viewed as the opiate of the masses, broke down traditional culture, et cetera, because he thought all of those things are barriers on the road to socialism. We will leave all the trappings of traditionalism, religion or whatever behind and live in the flowering communist utopia of milk and honey or whatever.

But I think what a lot of Marxist accounts get wrong is not understanding [that] tradition is the brakes on capitalism. The brakes on the economic forces that you are rightly angry about is tradition, in many cases is religion. Who is a bigger problem for the American economy? Somebody who is single into their 30s because they just want to have fun and they live in a big city, and when their job transfers them to San Francisco, they can pack up and move and they have no attachments and they have kids late, etc. Or is it somebody who gets married in their 20s, is religiously conservative and does not want to move to the big job in the city and wants to stay in the town they grew up in? Obviously, the second person is a much bigger problem for capitalism than the socially progressive, enlightened, living out my truth first person. So Marxists in general have been insufficiently appreciative of the way in which Tradition, Etc. is a really, really important check on the unfettered forces of market expansion and the turning of everything into a commodity.…

The left imagines you can have an anti-traditionalist society or whatever that also is anti-capitalist, and I’m not sure if that is true or not. I mean … there’s a French Marxist named [Michel] Clouscard, who always jokes that the cultural world view that governs America and the West is left libertarianism. And, he says, it’s a world in which everything is permitted, but nothing is possible, right? You can do whatever you want, you can love whoever you want, you can live however you want, et cetera, but economically nothing is possible.

This is, I think, essential if still debatable. For something like it, see Alan Jacobs on “metaphysical capitalism.”

Tyler Austin Harper:

This is something Michael Lind has been on since the 1990s, that the American public, the median American voter is basically fiscally liberal and socially conservative or moderate. There’s no party that represents that voter.

I think what we are seeing right now is a very, very slow moving but noticeable trajectory, where people are starting to figure out that the public is somewhat left on the economy. They are attracted to [things like] Medicare for All … but also they are pretty moderate on a range of issues, including immigration. This includes also minority working class folks who are moderate on immigration, et cetera.

I think there is a very, very slow arms race for moving toward, gradually, one of the parties embracing some kind of, whatever you want to call it, left conservatism, working class socialism… That’s where the public seems to be, roughly speaking.

I’ll be honest, I don’t see or feel that. At all. But I certainly hope he’s right and lament the lack of representation. (Also, what on earth is a “slow arms race?” And [high, drawn out inflection] who is racing for moderates?)

I’ve had dozens and dozens and dozens of conversations where people have described themselves as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” No one has ever said, as I often want to say and said just the other day, “I’m kinda fiscally liberal and socially conservative.” (Liberal with [non-essential] money, conservative in [essential] relations, charity in all things.)

I basically see two or three splits. There are those on the left who have, almost entirely, stopped referring to themselves as “liberal” and instead unabashedly use the term “progressive.” This is quite common.

The folks who don’t like the term or ideology “progressive” — of which I confess I am one — are either the all-American conservative type: fiscally and socially conservative, and usually quite serious, and conservative, about their Christianity; or they are basically the secular conservative type: self-described as “socially liberal, fiscally conservative,” (often, I note, said as though they just came up with that description on the spot) and usually not very serious about Christianity or faith of any kind — often more serious about libertarianism than about “organized religion.”

As a non-progressive, I don’t fit into either of these groups — closer in many ways to the first, but so utterly averse to the praxis when it comes to politics, science, history, market economy, and often technology as to make that closeness basically illegible if not unintelligible.

While I know lots of folks on the left, I really don’t know many religious Democrats, leftists, or progressives. I assume that it’s partly the circles I happen to walk in — I’m sure my continued discomfort with the Anglican church doesn’t exactly expand that friend group — and partly because I live in Maine, but I don’t know many of the folks who make up what David French has called the “God gap” in and around the Democratic Party. I thoroughly act with the assumption they are there in plenty, but I mostly only know of them.

I’m not officially OCIA, but I’m known to them, have met with them, and I’m on the list or whatever — I just can’t find time to attend the meetings or even to figure out how serious I am about Catholicism. My sense, though, is that this could put me around at least a few strongly religious lefties, but we’ll see.

In any case, I would love to believe the Lind thesis above, but I certainly don’t believe anyone got there by polling the demographic of Maine 🙂

WSJ:

WASHINGTON—President Trump called Elon Musk on Wednesday and asked him to lift restrictions on a military-grade version of Starlink in Ukraine that the SpaceX chief had throttled, U.S. officials said.

The system was working more normally Thursday, shortly after their conversation, U.S. and Ukrainian officials said. Some Ukrainian officials said the system wasn’t restored to full functionality but was working at higher speeds than under the cap. 

Trump told Musk he was frustrated the system’s speeds remained capped at around 100 miles an hour, officials said. The speed limit rendered some of Ukraine’s offensive drones and interceptors powerless against Russian attacks. Their conversation followed a Wall Street Journal report revealing that Musk ordered the slowdown, though SpaceX and the White House have differing accounts about whether the world’s richest man acted alone or at the administration’s behest.

Trump has told aides and allies this week that he wanted to reverse the slowdown of Starlink, which Ukraine’s forces use to defend themselves along the front line, the officials said.

“Removal of the throttle limit will do much to enable Ukraine’s strike capabilities at operational depths and its current effort to scale up deployment of jet-powered interceptors,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on the war at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kofman added that he had heard from Ukrainian military units that early tests suggest the system is now working more regularly.

“I don’t comment one way or the other,” Trump said on Thursday when asked about the Journal’s reporting that he had called Musk. “The bottom line: He put it back.”

Jeffrey Foucault:

Maybe we’re all hostage to a corporate-government cabal of outright grifters and psychopathic nerds. Maybe our sclerotic empire is shuffling toward catastrophe, riding the AI hustle into Weimar-style inflation and debt oblivion, and listing toward fascism. Maybe our tax dollars seem only to sharpen the longest knives, to build the bombs our proxies drop on children and families in countries we couldn’t have located on a map before we read about them in the news, while our government threatens our neighbors, extorts our allies, and terrifies and incarcerates the most vulnerable among us, then turns around and pawns our wild lands and clean waters for short term gain with all the ethical concern of a cancer cell. 

Maybe the politicians on both sides are bought off, and the money intercedes like a clutch between the gears so that our votes are too often a ritual pantomime. Maybe we’re bought off ourselves, as we dither and temporize, perform for our tribes, playact identity politics and entertain ourselves to death, walking around on the stilts we simultaneously lengthen and saw through a little farther each day. 

Maybe we all wander the digital funhouse, never sure what’s real, walking headlong into mirrors, lost in certainty and righteous anger at our neighbors, some preferring Hollywood nostalgia, the easy lie, the tax break, the reflexive jingo patriotism that Johnson called the last refuge of a scoundrel, while others strive for the valor of a correct opinion, as long as it doesn’t interfere with our wealth or comfort, always willing to join the good fight on any issue that flatters our pieties, so long as it requires no discussion of class, and doesn’t jeopardize our place near the top, just below the billionaires and the multimillionaires, where we’ve pulled up the ladder behind us and barricaded ourselves into expensive neighborhoods with artisanal bread and expensive coffee, and people who speak and dress just like we do, while the rest scrape. 

Maybe we ignore the desperation and despair that drive the opinions of our neighbors, Americans like us, whom we’ve written off as beneath our contempt, the ones who fly the flag without irony, send their kids into the military and work two or three jobs, mortgaging their futures as their real wages decline year over year, sold out by both parties and ready to tear the whole thing down; or maybe the ones who hang “Fuck ICE” signs in their windows and quietly drive their undocumented neighbors to work and prenatal appointments. 

Maybe this is all true. It’s no stretch to say that this world we’ve made is a furnace and a charnel house, and modern history reads like a butcher’s bill. But we still have to locate our work — even, or especially, when that work is play — and go like hell, and use what we have to help, however we can. 

Much of the time it feels pointless, self-indulgent, and meaningless. But it’s everything. Every time you think of quitting, consider your life without the ones who lighted your way: the art they made, the stories they told, the songs they wrote, the love and work they put into the world. Then keep going. It makes no sense, and it’s the only thing that makes sense.

He includes this message as well, which I’ll pass along here:

TOUR  — We’re in Chicago (Berwyn) tonight (10/21), in Minneapolis on Thursday (10/22), and then out to Thompson and Fargo, ND. to finish up the tour (10/23,25). In November we’ll work our way up the coast of California to Oregon and Washington, and I’m breaking even, if I’m lucky. 

Numbers are down across the board for live music, attendance down twenty-five or thirty percent with the war and tariffs and inflation, and that percentage is where the whole of our margin resides. Flights, hotels, gasoline, rental vans, food: everything has gone up in price except us. 

I know it’s hard to justify a night on the town when you’re barely getting by. So I’m asking you to please share this with anyone you know in Chicago, Minneapolis, Fargo, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Portland, Seattle, etc. — any town on our line — so that even a few more people will know we’re coming to town. The hardest part is ringing the bell these days.

Or just share it with someone who needs to hear it. I woke up early on the road and wrote it out in a notebook and haven’t been able to figure out what to do with it, so I thought I’d send it to you.

Get out there and do your work, and vote your conscience, early and in-person if you can, and then be ready for whatever comes next. Ready with fierce love, and courage.

https://jeffreyfoucault.com/tour

Wendell Berry (1989):

Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.

Of course, my sometime impression that I live on the receiving end of this problem is false, for country people contribute their full share. The truth is that we Americans, all of us, have become a kind of human trash, living our lives in the midst of a ubiquitous damned mess of which we are at once the victims and the perpetrators. We are all unwilling victims, perhaps; and some of us even are unwilling perpetrators, but we must count ourselves among the guilty nonetheless. In my household we produce much of our own food and try to do without as many frivolous “necessities” as possible—and yet, like everyone else, we must shop, and when we shop we must bring home a load of plastic, aluminum, and glass containers designed to be thrown away, and “appliances” designed to wear out quickly and be thrown away.

I confess that I am angry at the manufacturers who make these things. There are days when I would be delighted if certain corporation executives could somehow be obliged to eat their products. I know of no good reason why these containers and all other forms of manufactured “waste”—solid, liquid, toxic, or whatever—should not be outlawed. There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.

But our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom—a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom—and all of us are involved in it. […]

I think that we must learn to see the trash on our streets and roadsides, in our rivers, and in our woods and fields, not as the side effects of “more jobs” as its manufacturers invariably insist that it is, but as evidence of good work not done by people able to do it.