Things I like to read with my morning coffee.

You write with real moral seriousness here. What I admire most is the balance. You allow grief, anger, history, law, memory, and political contradiction to sit in the same piece without flattening any of them. That takes control.

The connection to Malcolm X works especially well because you don’t use him as decoration. You use his words to sharpen the central question: what happens when a system’s ideals and its behavior split apart. From there, the essay keeps widening, from Tehran to 1953 to Europe to the fragile theater of international law, without losing the human pulse underneath.

And that final turn toward the child in Tehran gives the whole piece its weight. You end not with abstraction, but with inheritance. Not policy, but memory. That choice stays with the reader