This is mostly n+1 doing its thing workmanlikely, but the slightly higher rating is warranted by Matthew McNaught's "Yarmouk Miniatures: Saadallah Wannous and the War on Stories," an absolute five-star jewel of a piece that reminds us what we've lost (as a human species) in Syria, that this was an ancient society and a bunch of regular people's immeasurably precious lives and not just a, like "case of ISIS" in the clinical sense. Everybody should read that. Also of note is a letter in response to Mark Greif's earlier piece about the cops that hacked on cops using critical theory in righteous but predictable ways--the letter is from a cop who has read his Foucault and Nietzsche, and it ultimately fails but it's good to give your unexamined beliefs a workout. ( )