He sent me origami tutorials, clips from experimental German films of the sixties and seventies, bhangra playlists, Palestinian newspaper coverage of World War I from a digital archive I’d never heard of, and then, from the same year, scanned diary pages of an Armenian in Alexandria—a schoolgirl describing the boys she admired from church … I was surprised that someone like him could have such eclectic tastes, that he could be historically inclined and access a larger world through the cracked screen of his outdated phone. I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d cobbled together this collection
...more
