Many sports, by nature, require you to push your body to the limit—beyond it, even. For young athletes, in particular, we’ve seen the consequences of equating physical pain with elite performance and self-worth, in the form of broken bodies and silent suffering. The less athletically inclined might wonder whether the costs of competitive sport are too high for its rewards. Fights to the death, judged by the turn of an emperor’s thumb, were once popular entertainment. But we’d now think of them as barbaric.

In her debut novel, Rita Bullwinkel confronts the damage and injury of physical competition but offers an insight into why athletes might want to battle on. Headshot dives into the bloody, sweaty, achy world of girls for whom pain is not a side effect but a direct result of the sport they’ve chosen. The book follows eight teenagers as they pummel each other for the right to be named the best under-18 female boxer in America. They have traveled from around the country to a dusty gym in Reno, Nevada, to find out who can best dodge, withstand, and dole out punches. In the process, the novel asks: Why? What makes these girls dedicate their bodies to the ring?

Boxing is a sport in which fists themselves can break, but the name of the tournament these teens are participating in—the Women’s 18 & Under Daughters of America Cup—smacks of pageants and cotillions. It conjures white gloves, not boxing mitts. The awkward juxtaposition seems intentional; although each of the contestants is strange and fierce in her own way, the competition seems absurd. We know from very early on that the tournament matters to almost no one other than the girls fighting in it. There is no audience for women’s boxing. “Even if they were to go and box professionally, hit some women in bikinis in the basement of a casino in Las Vegas,” the novel’s omniscient narrator confides in the reader, “they wouldn’t impress the people who they encounter in their lives outside of boxing.”

The narrator is our entry into the girls’ minds, telling us what they’re thinking but also zooming into the future to offer up facts they are unaware of. At times, the narrator dispenses a cruel-seeming but ultimately matter-of-fact judgment—for instance, calling two of the contestants “delusional” for their dedication to the tournament, but then describing how those delusions are useful and allow them to fight with more focus. Other times, the narration dips closer to the girls’ inner monologues. We learn that one girl has been through enough hardship to understand “that this shit is meaningless”—an awareness that swallows not only the tournament but also all of life’s mysterious losses and victories. Yet she, too, wants to win, to be “the best of the best of the nation.” That repeated best seems like it belongs to her; we are looking not at her but through her at the world.

[Read: When good pain turns into bad pain]

These athletes have no real fans. The audience is minimal, mostly just a few coaches, the other girls, and an occasional relative. Family support is varied: One fighter comes to the tournament matches with her grandmother, who has almost no grasp of boxing, while another attends completely alone. One girl wishes that her siblings would come, but they usually don’t. Whether or not the girls have kin with them, they each seem as alone in life as they are in the ring—different though they are from one another, not one of them seems understood. Even two cousins who are both competing are strangely at odds: The younger longs to bond with her relative, while the older feels encroached upon. Boxing is not a team sport. You win alone, and you lose alone.

The contestants’ isolation is accentuated by the fact that all the judges and coaches are men, a dynamic the girls are very aware of. (The verisimilitude with real life—the majority of coaches for women’s college sports are men—will not be lost on most readers.) Often, we see these authority figures through the girls’ eyes; one girl thinks of them as “the men referees, and the men coaches and the men judges and their sad paunches.” These are not mentors. Whereas the girls have devoted a huge percentage of their lives to this sport, the judges, for instance, have less interest than mere hobbyists:

The judges work at Safeway and at Amazon fulfillment factories and inside the casinos with the alcoholic grenades. The white they all wear is not a uniform, but just a color specification … to make sure that they all look the part they are being paid to play. Some of the judges don’t even like boxing. It was from YouTube videos, and a one sheet that [the gym owner] sent, that they learned about the game.

These men know far less than the girls, and yet they are in charge. It is one thing to be under the thumb of the powerful; it’s a harsher kind of injustice to be judged by those with no respect for the game.

Again and again, Bullwinkel emphasizes the indignity of the contest. Reno is a city whose “drag looked like Las Vegas had shrunk its own glowing strip architecture and handed it down.” The physical prize itself, the Daughters of America Cup trophy, is shoddily constructed and would never hold water, having “a slit in the cup where the plastic mold came together”—it’s a worthless symbol of how little even the winner will be valued. Meanwhile, the cost of the girls’ participation is potentially astronomical; one girl has damaged her hand so badly that when she is “sixty she won’t be able to hold a cup of tea.” The knowledge that fighting will someday steal this simple pleasure from her dampens any anticipation of her possible win. It’s a strange move for a novelist to center an entire plot on a competition that barely seems worth it.

Yet this is also Headshot’s greatest strength. The story becomes less about who will win than about what drives each girl toward a battle with no obvious reward. Bullwinkel makes us into fans. The tournament structure—which the book closely mimics—gives Bullwinkel the space to explore different ways of being a teenage girl. Most chapters depict matches, though they’re less preoccupied by muscle movements than by the girls’ pains, fears, and coping mechanisms. One fighter wears a raccoon hat because she figures that looking deranged will throw off her enemies; another is a “people pleaser” who, even as she loses, clings to the “form” she’s been taught; another, whose hair is in “the archetype of a ponytail,” wants to beat her older sisters’ past boxing glory. Yet another was once locked in a shed for 12 hours by bullying classmates. Two of the girls are haunted by memories of dead bodies, and they think of those deaths as they fight. These psychological portraits allow the reader to understand that the girls are not fools or naive, that each has picked boxing because of her own demons.

Underdogs are the fodder of sports fiction from Rocky to Ted Lasso; one of the mythological origins of the Olympic Games is Zeus wrestling his dad. In much fiction, being an underdog is a character’s golden ticket—impoverished boy finds a magic bean and beats a giant is a more satisfying story than poor boy is swindled out of his cow and then his family starves. But here’s the thing: Bullwinkel has written a novel with eight underdogs, and seven of them must lose. Each of the girls walks into the tournament already wounded by life; the indignities they face aren’t limited to those of the contest. Even the girl whose sisters are former boxers—the closest thing to a Goliath that this competition has—is vulnerable in the outside world; her family lives “in a double-mortgaged house in an undesirable suburb” and, lacking status, is “close to no one.” Perhaps the greatest evidence that these girls are all underdogs is that they are competing for this smallest scrap of glory in the first place.

[Read: Nine books every sports lover should read]

Reading this novel reminded me of an argument I once got into with a sports fan. I found it hard to get invested in any sport as a viewer. No matter who won, the whole cycle would begin again; there was always another competition. He, knowing well my preferred form of leisure activity—reading—retorted that there is always another novel, another cycle of character-versus-the-world or character-versus-themselves. I couldn’t say much to that. Many audiences are happy to ignore these cycles in order to indulge in their chosen entertainment. Bullwinkel won’t let her readers forget. There is a moment, about two-thirds through the novel, when the question of who will win feels deeply irrelevant. Each of the girls has a compelling reason to be there. Their desires seem to cancel one another’s out. Bullwinkel frequently skips ahead to show us their post-sport futures, which emphasize the longer stretch of their lives, beyond the intense confines of the tournament. One will become a grocery-store manager; another will work in university admissions; another will become an actor. The majority of their lives will take place outside the bounds of this competition. The novel seems to be reminding us that these girls are much more than their places on the leaderboard.

But at the last minute, Headshot offers us something else. The final match arrives, the fight where the branches of the competition all meet. Bullwinkel describes triumph this way: “Today” the victor “need not dream of winning.” It’s a simple sentence that ends the chapter. And it turns Headshot, despite all its subversions, into a brilliant sports novel rather than just an excellent set of character studies. These girls will gain nothing material for their efforts—no fame, no wealth. But for one day, one girl is able to think of herself as a winner. What she receives is the simple fact that on that day, “out of all girls in the country,” she is “the best boxer.” The girl who wins is not the underdog, but she is an underdog, and her triumph is pure. This is sport for sport’s sake. Life is messy, full of death, bullies, and longing, but for the fighters, boxing grants the hope of complete, if momentary, fulfillment.

Following these battling girls through the tournament, we might wish for better conditions, for better treatment of their injuries, for judges who actually care about the sport they’re adjudicating. But futility and indignity don’t diminish the contestants’ bravery. And they are not fools. In a run-down gym, against all odds, they have found a way to taste glory. Bullwinkel’s epilogue is a terrifying fast-forward into the future, past the death of nations and through interstellar travel. In it, she imagines that girls will still be punching. The never-ending cycle of competitive sport becomes less like a futile act and more like a song that is passed down through the generations, growing more powerful in its repetition.

Mandeep Dhillon has plenty of acting credits, but has just released Roll It Up - a personal, "deep song".

Accidents happen everywhere, but not all accidents are equal. Many hours after initial news broke about an “incident” involving a helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s state media has still not confirmed whether he is dead or alive. Various state outlets have published contradictory news—Was Raisi seen on video link after the accident? Was he not? Was the National Security Council meeting? Was it not?—signaling chaos and panic. A source in Tehran close to the presidency told me that Raisi has been confirmed dead, and that the authorities are looking for a way to report the news without causing mayhem. I have not been able to independently confirm this.

Iran doesn’t seem like a country in which presidents die by accident. But it also is a country in which aircraft crash, due to the sorry state of infrastructure in the internationally isolated Islamic Republic. In previous years, at least two cabinet ministers and two leading military commanders have died in similar crashes. Raisi’s chopper, which also carried Iran’s foreign minister and two top regional officials, was passing through an infamously foggy and mountainous area in northwestern Iran. The “incident” might very well have been an accident.

Yet suspicions will inevitably surround the crash. After all, air incidents that killed high political officials in Northern Rhodesia (1961), China (1971), Pakistan (1988), and Poland (2010) are still often subject to speculation. In this case, much as in the others, one question will likely drive the speculation: Who stands to benefit politically from Raisi’s death? Even if the answer to this question does not ultimately tell us why the helicopter crashed, it could shed some light on what will come next in the Islamic Republic.

[Read: Iran stops pretending]

Raisi ascended to the presidency in 2021, in what appeared to be the least competitive election Iran had held since 1997. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had made sure that all other serious candidates were barred from running. Among those disqualified were not only reformists but also centrist conservatives and even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former hard-line president whom Khamenei came to see as a rival.

Raisi appeared to have been picked precisely because he could never be a serious rival to Khamenei. In 2017, he revealed himself to be utterly uncharismatic in electoral debates against then-President Hassan Rouhani. His time in office since 2021 also speaks not only to his sheer incompetence but also to his political irrelevance. Some call him the Invisible President. During the Women, Life, Freedom movement, which rocked Iran from 2022 to 2023, few protesters bothered to shout slogans against Raisi, because they knew that real power rested elsewhere.

For Khamenei, what mattered was that Raisi could be counted on to toe the regime’s line. Although competition is tight, Raisi may have more blood on his hands than any other living official of the Islamic Republic. Since the 1980s, the Islamic Republic has executed thousands of Iranian dissidents. The judiciary is the arm of the government that carries out this murderous function, and Raisi has held leading positions within it from the very start; he rose to become the head of the judiciary in 2019.

The same qualities that likely made Raisi seem like a safe regime choice for the presidency also made him a primary contender for succeeding Khamenei as the Supreme Leader. According to the Iranian constitution, only a cleric with serious political experience can become head of state. By now, many clerics who fit that description have died or been politically marginalized (many of them did not share Khamenei’s hard-line politics), leaving the field open to Raisi. In turn, many political observers expected that Raisi would be a weak supreme leader, allowing real power to flow elsewhere—to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), for example, or to other power centers around or ancillary to the regime. Who better for such a position than an unimpressive yes-man?

Raisi belongs to a very particular precinct of Iran’s political elite, and in the past few years, others in the political class had come to worry about the ambition of the circles surrounding him. A native of the holy city of Mashhad, in northeastern Iran, Raisi previously held the custodianship of the holy shrine in the city, which is also an economic empire in its own right. He is married to the daughter of Mashhad’s Friday-prayer leader, an arch social conservative. Raisi’s wife, Jamileh Alamolhoda, has played an unusually public role, leading some conservatives from outside the couple’s regional cadre to worry that after Khamenei’s eventual death, a “Mashhad clique” might come to the top of the regime.

[Read: Ebrahim Raisi has blood on his hands]

Raisi’s apparent passivity has also emboldened challengers among a band of particularly noxious hard-liners, who saw his weak presidency as an opportunity to raise their political profiles at the expense of more established conservatives, such as the parliamentary speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf. Some of these ultra hard-liners did well in the parliamentary election earlier this year, which was largely a contest within the hard-line camp. They ran a heated campaign against Qalibaf, who commanded the support of the main pro-regime conservative political parties and many outlets of the IRGC.

For all of these reasons, Raisi’s death would alter the balance of power among factions within the Islamic Republic. According to the Iranian constitution, his vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, would assume the duties of the presidency, and a council consisting of Mokhber, Qalibaf, and the judiciary chief Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i would have to organize new elections within 50 days.

When I asked an official close to Qalibaf about the political aftermath of the crash, he answered immediately: “Dr. Qalibaf will be the new president.”

He surely would like to be. Qalibaf’s ambition is news to no one; he has run for president several times, starting in 2005. More technocrat than ideologue, Qalibaf was a commander in the IRGC during the Iran-Iraq War and will likely command at least some support from within its ranks. His long tenure as mayor of Tehran (2005–2017) was marked by both a degree of competence and quite a bit of corruption. His political enemies have recently highlighted cases of corruption linked to him and his family. An official close to former President Rouhani tells me, “Qalibaf’s problem is that he wants it too much. Everyone knows he has zero principles and will do anything for power.”

If Qalibaf registers to run in a hastily organized presidential election, the Guardian Council might have a hard time rejecting him, given his deep links to power structures in Iran. But would Khamenei be happy with the presidency passing to a technocrat without proper Islamist credentials? Who else would be allowed to run, and could they defeat Qalibaf at the polls, as Ahmadinejad and Rouhani did respectively in 2005 and 2013?

What twists the plot is the fact that some regime officials and former officials who are supportive of Qalibaf also advocate for Khamenei’s son Mojtaba to succeed his father as the supreme leader. Mojtaba Khamenei has long been in the shadows, and little is known about the 54-year-old’s politics or views, but he is widely held to be a serious contender for the office. Could there be a bargain between Mojtaba and Qalibaf that paves a path to power for both of them?

When the Islamic Republic’s founding leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died, in 1989, Khamenei replaced him after making an unwritten pact with fellow cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who then assumed the presidency. The constitution was swiftly changed to give more powers to the president. Rafsanjani would come to regret the pact, as he was politically sidelined by Khamenei before dying what many in Iran consider a suspicious death, in 2017. Could this cautionary tale make both sides wary?

Many have anticipated a ferocious power struggle in Iran, but most expected it to follow Khamenei’s death. Now we are likely to see at least a dress rehearsal in which various factions will brandish their strength. As for the people of Iran, some have already started celebrating Raisi’s potential demise with fireworks in Tehran. Most Iranians barely feel represented by any faction of the Islamic Republic, and some might use a moment of political crisis to reignite the street protests that have repeatedly beleaguered the regime in the past. The country’s civic movements are exhausted following years of struggle (more than 500 people were killed in the most recent round of protests, from 2022 to 2023). Still, whatever shape the power struggle takes at the top, the people of Iran won’t receive it passively for long.

I am a member of a strange club that nobody wants to belong to, but whose numbers are steadily growing: innocent people convicted in Iran of espionage for what Iranian officials call the “tyrannical Zionist entity” (in other words, Israel). Many among us are foreigners—businesspeople, journalists, tourists, and academics like myself, who traveled to Iran for what they thought would be a brief visit, only to find themselves thrown in prison on dubious charges.

The European Union diplomat Johan Floderus, a Swedish citizen, is but the latest high-profile victim of Iranian hysteria over Israeli spies on its territory. Currently awaiting sentencing from a revolutionary court in Tehran, Floderus faces allegations of “very extensive intelligence cooperation with the Zionist occupation regime” and a charge of “corruption on earth,” which carries the death penalty. Sweden’s foreign minister has stated publicly that the accusations against Floderus are “completely baseless and false,” and the head of the EU foreign service has labeled him “illegally detained.”

I was convicted of espionage for Israel under similarly spurious pretenses in 2019. I had been invited to an academic conference in Iran as the guest of a local university, and was arrested by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport as I was about to fly home to Australia. I was handed a 10-year prison sentence, of which I served more than two years at the mercy of the IRGC before I was freed in a prisoner swap.

[Read: I was a hostage in Iran. The deals are part of the problem.]

During my time in the Iranian prison system, I learned Farsi and used every opportunity possible to study my captors. In addition to IRGC interrogators and prison guards, I encountered a number of influential regime figures, including the head of IRGC intelligence, the deputy foreign minister, and even Iran’s current chief nuclear negotiator. At various junctures, these men came to the prison to meet and speak with me, or agreed to do so while visiting for seemingly other purposes.

The fact that someone who had been convicted of espionage, however unjustly, was given access to such people is testament to the chaotic way in which intelligence work is conducted in the Islamic Republic. Indeed, although Iran’s authorities talk tough and cast an extremely wide net in their quest to capture the Mossad agents they believe are in their midst, a prevailing lack of competence has meant that very few actual spies ever seem to get caught.

Not only does the Islamic Republic arrest a large number of innocent people domestically, but the agents of its two intelligence bodies, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the IRGC’s intelligence unit, have a long history of bungling operations overseas. Many operatives get caught: Just last month, a suspected member of the IRGC Quds Force was arrested in Peru for plotting to kill Israelis living in the country. Indeed the three IRGC members who were released in exchange for me had been convicted in Thailand of targeting Israeli diplomats in a failed bomb plot. Rather than making final preparations in the days before their operation, these hapless agents had been photographed drinking alcohol and partying with local prostitutes. In the course of resisting arrest, one of them had even blown off his own leg with the bombs they’d assembled.

Of course, not every overseas Iranian-intelligence operation fails, and the consequences are devastating when they do not. In 1994, 85 people were killed at a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, in a bombing that Argentine courts later ruled was carried out on the orders of the Islamic Republic. Just last week, Argentina issued an Interpol red notice for Iran’s interior minister, Ahmad Vahidi, accusing him of having been behind the attack. The Islamic Republic is also apparently implicated in a string of assassinations and kidnappings of dissidents across Europe and the Middle East, as well as plots targeting Iranian opposition journalists in London and New York.

[Read: Iran’s deadly message to journalists abroad]

The incompetence and lack of professionalism of much of the Iranian intelligence apparatus stands in stark contrast to the efficiency of Israel’s, which is alleged to have carried out sophisticated sabotage and assassination plots on Iranian territory. Beginning in 2007, Israel is thought to have targeted scientists working on Iran’s nuclear program for assassination. At least six have been killed inside the country. In 2022 alone, seven officials affiliated with Iran’s missile or drone programs died under suspicious circumstances. Israel is also thought to have been behind two mysterious blasts at the Natanz nuclear facility, as well the theft of an enormous archive of documents relating to the nuclear program from a warehouse in Tehran. In 2023, Mossad even announced that it had kidnapped an IRGC hit man inside Iran; the Israeli agency released footage from his interrogation outside the country.

Somewhat bizarrely, my exchange for three blundering IRGC operatives wasn’t the only connection between my wrongful imprisonment and the high-stakes war of espionage that has long been playing out between Tehran and Tel Aviv. Less than 48 hours after I was freed from prison—and likely not unrelated to the deal that freed me—Israel carried out one of its most audacious missions on Iranian soil.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was an IRGC commander and the shadowy mastermind of Iran’s covert nuclear-weapons program. While the regime was busy welcoming the three convicted terrorists home with garlands of flowers and sleek propaganda reels, agents acting for Israel parked a blue Nissan pickup truck on a highway intersection near the hamlet of Absard, north of Tehran. Hidden on the truck bed beneath a tarpaulin was a remote-controlled, AI-programmed machine gun. As Fakhrizadeh’s motorcade crossed the intersection, the sniper, watching via satellite from thousands of kilometers away, opened fire. Fakhrizadeh was killed in a hail of bullets. The truck then blew itself up.

The Israelis had clearly been surveilling Fakhrizadeh for months, if not years, prior to the attack. Yet they held their fire until after I had departed Iranian airspace, a move that was much to my benefit, as such a brazen operation would undoubtedly have scuppered the deal for my release. That the attack so closely coincided with my prisoner swap, however, was unlikely to be an accident, and had less to do with me than with the three IRGC terrorists exchanged for my freedom. Australia probably  had to secure Israel’s consent for trading them, as they had been caught targeting Israeli diplomats. The IRGC, of course, would have known that. And so the Israelis opted to send Tehran a message by allowing the deal to go through but killing Fakhrizadeh at nearly the same time: They would go after a bigger target, and on Iranian soil besides. Unlike the IRGC’s three amateurish agents in Thailand, they didn’t fail.

The Iranian regime has shown itself to be supremely adept at surveilling, arresting, and interrogating political dissidents, social-media activists, members of armed separatist groups, and even underground terror cells from organizations such as the MEK. As the unprecedented crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrations shows, the regime retains a fierce grip on the country and runs it like a police state. All of which leaves one to wonder: Why does Iran do such a poor job of countering Israel’s operations inside its territory?

One clue lies in the fact that many, if not most, of the assassinations and other plots attributed to Israel, including the killing of Fakhrizadeh, are conducted with the participation of local Iranian recruits. Interestingly, the quadcopter drones thought to have been used in Israel’s April 19 attack on a military facility in Isfahan province were also most likely assembled and launched from inside Iran.

The Islamic Republic’s security apparatus has long assumed that Israel is sending foreign tourists and other visitors to Iran to spy on its behalf. But this supposition seems more and more like a costly distraction from the real issue at hand: A not-insignificant number of Iranian citizens inside Iran appear willing to risk torture, imprisonment, and execution in order to assist enemies of their own government.

Iranian security agencies have had little success in thwarting Israeli activities inside their country in part because authoritarian regimes prioritize loyalty over competence. IRGC intelligence officials tend to owe their positions to either ideological conformity or to strong family or personal ties within the organization. If you weren’t a true believer (or at least good at pretending to be one) and didn’t have other IRGC members to vouch for you, you didn’t have a hope of becoming even a lowly prison official in a Revolutionary Guard detention facility. As one guard boasted to me, “Our positions aren’t advertised.” In such a system, aptitude, skill, and even security training are much lower priorities. The least suitable people can attain high ranks, while better-qualified candidates who are deemed insufficiently ideologically committed miss out.

The result is a lack of professionalism, which I observed firsthand during the 804 days I spent in IRGC custody. For example, I was once able to text the Australian embassy in the middle of an interrogation, because my interrogator had made the rookie error of leaving my confiscated phone in the room after he stepped out. On another occasion, I was able to trick one of my captors into revealing details of the diplomatic negotiations surrounding my release. And although I’m unable to go into specifics, female prisoners are routinely able to take advantage of the IRGC guards’ squeamishness about women’s bodies to smuggle information outside the prison.

Selected for ideological orthodoxy, the Revolutionary Guards I interacted with bought into all manner of conspiracy theories, which undoubtedly distorted their understanding of geopolitics and hamstrung their ability to interrogate suspects. I was regularly forced to listen to lengthy tirades about secretive Zionists pulling the levers of the global economy, or Israeli plots to poison the sperm counts of Muslim men in a scheme to achieve demographic supremacy. My handlers admitted to watching spy shows involving the Middle East, such as Fauda, Tehran, and Homeland. These seemed to reinforce their tendency to see the hand of Mossad behind every calamity that befell Iran, man-made or otherwise. Such paranoia helps explain the shockingly high numbers of innocent people, most of them Iranian, imprisoned on charges of working for Israel. Sadly, many of these people make false confessions under duress, which in turn gives the authorities the impression that they are catching real spies.

Institutional incompetence is not the sole reason Iran’s agencies have been losing the shadow intelligence war with Israel. Like all brutal authoritarian regimes, the Islamic Republic knows no language other than intimidation and the threat of violence. It has proved unable to offer positive incentives or rewards to those who might be in a position to assist it. The population, including the Islamic Republic’s traditional religious constituency, broadly loathes the regime; even the most disinterested and self-serving opportunist is reluctant to gather information on its behalf. The IRGC in turn distrusts the people it rules over and believes that cooperation can only be forcibly coerced.

[Read: How fake spies ruin real intelligence]

I experienced this approach myself in Evin Prison. Before I was put on trial, Revolutionary Guard interrogators accosted me with an offer of recruitment. Would I agree to travel to London to collect information on the Iranian dissident community? Would I use my status as an academic to visit Israel, effectively as an Iranian agent? Then, after the trial, they used the absurd 10-year sentence I was dealt as a lever of blackmail. The IRGC would only enter into negotiations over my freedom, I was told, if I agreed to work for them; if I did agree, I would be beholden to them in every way once freed.

“How do you know I won’t just run away after I’m allowed to leave Iran?” I asked the recruiters.

The answer was sobering. The IRGC had operatives on Australian soil, they told me, just as they did in Europe and North America. If I reneged, they would kill me. For more than 18 months, I resisted this pressure. It relented only after I leaked to the international press that I was a recruitment target.

The IRGC are better placed to blackmail Iranian or dual-national prisoners than they were with me. Anyone who has family members living in Iran faces an impossible choice: Agree to spy for the regime, or see your loved ones jailed and tortured alongside you. And because unwilling recruits can’t be fully trusted, they are then subjected to near-constant surveillance and threats to prevent them from escaping. During the years I spent in IRGC custody, I encountered several such people, three of whom were ultimately sent abroad on behalf of the IRGC.

Iran’s heavy-handed approach contrasts sharply with the methods that Israel is rumored to employ inside Iran. In prison I met several Iranian Muslims convicted of activities that linked them to Israel, and I heard stories of numerous others. Some were shown to have been calling Israel over Skype, or chatting with Israelis in internet message forums. Of course, many such people are innocent of any crime, and were likely just curious about a neighboring country whose name they had been encouraged to curse since primary school. There appeared to be slightly more substance to the allegations against a small number of others.

From what I came to understand, Israel has been able to capitalize on the Islamic Republic’s record of poor governance, economic mismanagement, poverty, and political repression to offer would-be collaborators valuable ways out. These could take the form of bundles of cash or offers of permanent residency, not only for Iranians who assist their operations, but for their family members as well. In this respect as in many others, the Islamic Republic has become its own greatest adversary: Having shown itself over the decades to be impervious to ideological moderation or reform from within, it has become so hated that its own people—its biggest victims—are willing to embrace the possibility that the enemy of their enemy is their friend. I lost track of the number of Iranians in prison who advocated for heavier economic sanctions and openly welcomed American or Israeli air strikes on Iran.

These sentiments have translated into robust support for Israel on social media, including from inside Iran, much of it making no reference to the horrors currently unfolding in Gaza. Some Iranians condemned the IRGC’s April 13 missile and drone attacks on Israel and cheered on Israel’s retaliation. Somewhat embarrassingly, the regime was forced to issue an official notice threatening to arrest anyone expressing these sentiments online. It followed through by arresting Mobina Rostami, a member of the national volleyball team, after she posted on social media: “As an Iranian, I am truly ashamed of the authorities’ attack on Israel, but you need to know that the people in Iran love Israel and hate the Islamic Republic.”

Israel and Iran’s tit-for-tat military strikes on each other’s territory will likely lead to a further intensification of their long-standing clandestine activities. As a result, Iran will likely throw more innocent people in prison; it will bungle more overseas operations; and ultra-hard-liners in its security establishment will double down on repressing a population that despises them. Such authoritarian tactics have already benefited Iran’s enemies and will continue to do so, offering Israel the upper hand in the covert war of espionage within Iran’s borders and abroad.

Photographs by Gordon Parks

I

am the granddaughter of domestic workers. My maternal grandmother was Luretha Little, an only child, who left her parents behind in North Carolina, and then her husband and two young sons in Virginia in search of freedom in New Jersey, where her sons eventually joined her and where my mother was born in 1955. In Newark, Luretha and her second husband, Elijah Griffin, had four more children. They ran a janitorial business, cleaning the offices of white doctors in Woodbridge and white scientists in New Brunswick. Sometimes they brought their children and put them to work: the twin boys swept the floors, and my mother dusted desks and polished ashtrays. My paternal grandmother, Hilda Ramdoo, was nicknamed Dolly because she was a pretty baby. One of nine children born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, she had seven of her own. By the time my father was an adult, his mother had temporarily left her husband, Antonio Tillet, and remaining six children to work in Caracas, where she cleaned the homes of the Venezuelan elite; she later went to Boston, where her entire family eventually joined her, and where I was born in 1975.

I think a lot about these two women and their countless hours of labor in the homes or offices of others. Though they were separated by race, nationality, and age, because of their gender and class they were relegated to the same job. But they also had full lives. Seven children each. Luretha loved Mahalia and Motown. Dolly was one of the first women to start a Carnival band in Trinidad. They were pious and proper and quick-tongued and outspoken. I think a lot about what existed for them beyond work when I look at Gordon Parks’s most memorable image: the 1942 photograph he initially labeled Washington D.C. Government Charwoman,  but renamed American Gothic during the revolutionary 1960s.

More than half a century later, Parks recounted making this first portrait of Ella Watson, the 59-year-old African American cleaning woman who, like him, worked at the Farm Security Administration offices in Washington, D.C. “So it happened that, in one of the government’s most sacred strongholds,” he wrote, “I set up my camera for my first professional photograph.”

“On the wall,” he continued, “was a huge American flag hanging from the ceiling to the floor.” Parks asked Watson “to stand before it, placed the mop in one hand, a broom in the other, then instructed her to look into the lens.”

This capture of Watson at work—wearing a neatly pressed polka-dotted puffed-sleeve dress and wire-rimmed glasses, her hair parted to the side, with a straw broom and rag mop on either side of her and a slightly out-of-focus American flag hanging behind her—is now so familiar to me that I don’t remember when I first saw it. But I didn’t know until recently that it is what Parks considered his “first” professional photograph, setting him on the path to becoming one of the most innovative and influential photographers of all time.

Washington DC. August 1942. Mrs Ella Watson, a government chairwoman, leaves for work at 4:30pm. (The Gordon Parks Foundation)

In July and August 1942, Parks took more than 90 photographs of Watson, her family, and her community, in a project that rejected long-standing caricatures of Black women as mammies or subservient maids. More than a decade before hundreds of Black women domestic workers helped organize the Montgomery bus boycott, Parks’s series with Watson revealed Black domestics as they often were: patriotic, political, and pious.

In his memoir, A Choice of Weapons, Parks recalled entering the FSA offices for the first time, walking “confidently down the corridor, following the arrows to my destination, sensing history all around me, feeling knowledge behind every door I passed.” Roy Stryker, the head of the FSA’s Historical Section, sensing that Parks’s naivete would not serve him or his future subjects well, encouraged him to leave his camera behind and get to know the city by going for a bus ride, taking in a movie, shopping at a drugstore or a department store, or dining at local restaurants. “I wanted to kill everyone,” Parks said about those experiences. “I’ve never been so mad.” Unlike in Saint Paul, where he came of age, or even his more recent home, Chicago, in D.C., he faced the harsh reality of the district’s strict segregation laws and was denied service or entry everywhere he went. Furious, Parks told Stryker that he needed to document this story of American racism and then plotted his plan in bold strokes. “I wanted to photograph every rotten discrimination in the city, and show the world how evil Washington was,” Parks said. “I had the biggest, vaguest ideas in the world.” After making it clear that such a project would require him to hire all of Life magazine’s photographers for the rest of their lives, Stryker encouraged Parks to focus on and follow one person to achieve his goals. Stryker indicated a woman who was mopping the hallway floor nearby. “Go have a talk with her before you go home this evening,” he said. “See what she has to say about life and things. You might find her interesting.”

(The Gordon Parks Foundation)

Born in late March 1883 in Washington, D.C., Ella Watson had been a domestic for most of her life by the time she met Parks. In 1898, at age 15, she left school and later that year found a job ironing at the Frazee Laundry in Washington. She worked intermittently, listing “maid” and “laundress” as her employment on the census until she found a temporary position as a custodian at the State Department in 1919. The following year, she doubled up, working as a caretaker in a white family’s home and cleaning another federal agency building. She managed to secure steady employment at the Post Office Department for most of the 1920s, then moved to the Treasury Department (where the FSA was also located) in 1929; she remained there until 1944. “I came to find out a very significant thing,” Parks later remembered. Watson “had moved into the [office] building at the same time, she said, as the [white] woman who was now a notary public. They came there with the same education, the same mental facilities and equipment, and she was now scrubbing this woman’s room every evening.”

I have always wondered whether Parks saw parts of his biography in Watson’s story. Long before he worked for the railroad, much less became a professional photographer, a teenage Gordon Parks was homeless in his new city of Saint Paul. He worked weekends at his boardinghouse to make ends meet, washing dishes and mopping floors. A few years later, like millions of Americans during the Depression, he was destitute again. Having lost all his belongings on an earlier trip to Chicago, a desperate Parks got a gig at the Hotel Southland. Because of his race, this run-down establishment barred him from renting one of the rooms he was responsible for cleaning.

Having to clean for the hotel’s white, working-class, and almost always drunk guests brought out the worst in him. The Southland was filled with a “bad breath of smoke, alcohol, sour bodies and human excrement” and “pickpockets, alcoholics, bums, addicts, perverts, panhandlers,” and the only way Parks could survive was to “hold my own here, where profanity meant prestige and politeness invited abuse.” Hating every day of his short-lived experience there, Parks concluded, “It was a harsh and ugly time,” marked mainly by his “longing for the time when I could get into a tub of hot water and soak out the smell of the place.”

I do not know if Parks divulged his past to Watson, but she shared much with him. “Would you allow me to photograph you?” he awkwardly asked her one early-summer evening in 1942. “In an old dress like this?” she humbly replied. Soon Parks had his most enduring photograph, but he realized he knew little of his subject beyond the image. When he approached her later to ask if he could continue to document her and learn more about her life, Watson joked that it might take some time because she was a grandmother. She then told a life story that sounded to Parks like “a bad dream.” By the time he met her, her husband had died (in 1927), and she was raising her adopted teenage daughter and her adopted daughter’s nieces and nephews. Watson, a single mother and the sole provider for the family, was left to survive on an annual wage of $1,080. And she knew she was locked permanently into this status.

Whether Parks consciously identified with Watson as a domestic remains unclear. But in the actual photographs, we can see his identification with and respect for her as a laborer in unexpected ways. Rather than remove all evidence of himself in the portraits of Watson cleaning the offices, he subtly included traces of his photography equipment. Parks established a reciprocity between their lives and their labor. He knew it was not a one-to-one correlation. “By comparison,” he reflected after learning of Watson’s hardships, “my experiences were akin to a peaceful afternoon.” The images were trenchant critiques of the limited economic opportunities available to Black people, particularly Black women in Jim Crow America, while they also told Watson’s story with visual nuance and depth.

Washington, DC. August 1942. Ella Watson cleaning after regular working hours. (The Gordon Parks Foundation) Washington DC. August 1942. Mrs. Ella Watson, a government chairwoman, reading the Bible to her house-hold. (The Gordon Parks Foundation)

Stryker immediately understood the disruptive power of Government Charwoman. Balking after Parks showed it to him, he said, “Well, you’re catching on, but that picture could get us all fired.” Aware that southern members of Congress had already complained about the FSA’s publishing images of Black people impoverished in the segregated South, Stryker encouraged Parks to continue documenting Watson.

The most dominant image of Black domestic workers in mainstream America at the time was that of a mammy, a Black woman who happily served at the whims of white employers. By 1941, the image had peaked: Hattie McDaniel won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Ruth “Mammy,” a formerly enslaved woman on the Tara plantation and house servant to Scarlett O’Hara in the pro-Confederate movie Gone With the Wind. Years later, when a friend criticized her for “playing so many servant parts, or ‘handkerchief heads’ as they came to be called,” McDaniel responded, “Hell, I’d rather play a maid than be one.”

Although Parks was not alone in creating a counternarrative to racist stereotypes, his image remains one of the most enduring. Two years before Parks arrived in the capital, his literary hero Richard Wright sent his agent a manuscript titled Slave Market (later renamed Black Hope), about the plight of Black housemaids. Wright hoped the novel might “reveal in a symbolic manner the potentially strategic position, socially and politically, which women occupy in the world today.” But he never published the book, and another eight years would pass before Lutie Johnson, a domestic worker turned blues singer, would appear in print in Ann Petry’s social-realist novel The Street.

Parks never saw Watson as just a symbol. Through sustained documentation of her life, the civil-rights aesthetic he pursued and perfected for the rest of his career took form. In that brief encounter with Watson, her friends, and her family, Parks realized his capacity to depict Black people in his art the way he knew them in the world: as multidimensional, multitudinous, and agents of social change.

He achieved this, in part, through a swap. Parks later admitted to having Grant Wood’s American Gothic in mind when he placed Watson in a pose similar to that of both figures in Wood’s 1930 painting. Parks likely saw the painting—now one of the most recognizable of 20th-century American art—during a train layover in Chicago in 1937. Unlike the sharp social commentary of the FSA photographs, Wood’s painting was both bucolic and nostalgic. The obvious middle-classness harkened back to an age of prosperity and stability before the Great Depression. “What does matter is whether or not these faces are true to American life,” Wood wrote about his models in a 1941 letter, “and reveal something about it.”

Recently, I went to see Wood’s American Gothic on a lark. I had seen the painting many times as one of the many tourists who flock to the American wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, looked at it from various angles, and debated its import as kitsch or haute culture. But this time, I had Parks and Watson in my head, and I found myself less interested in the farmer and his daughter (many people mistake the woman for a wife) and more invested in Parks’s transformation of a double portrait into a single one.

In Parks’s version, Watson stood in for both figures. In Wood’s painting, the division of labor falls along traditional gender lines. The older man and the younger woman are outdoors, and the pitchfork is the main clue to their labor. The farmer uses it daily, making it a crucial part of his routine and work, as the painting suggests, in public. The young woman’s gaze suggests a dependency on him, and her kitchen garb indicates that she does not work alongside him but might take care of the home. By replacing those two figures with Watson, a Black cleaning woman, Parks troubled the notions of gender, race, and work. As Watson cleaned those stairwells and offices in the after-hours, the wartime bureaucracy of the FSA became a domestic space, and women’s labor was no longer unseen.

I am drawn to those photographs that fully refuse Watson’s invisibility and revel in her interiority. Parks travels with her far beyond the office building and witnesses her different types of emotional, familial, and intergenerational labor: her preparing to go to and returning from work; her feeding and dressing her grandchildren, and combing their hair.

Washington DC. August 1942. Mrs. Ella Watson receives anointment from Reverend Clara Smith during the Flower bowl demonstration, a service held once a year at the St Martin’s Spiritual church. (The Gordon Parks Foundation) Washington DC. August 1942. Mrs. Ella Watson, a government chairwoman, with three grandchildren and her adopted daughter. (The Gordon Parks Foundation)

Interspersed are moments in which Watson created an alternative to the racism she experienced at work and a curative to her daily grind. As poignant as but less popular than her overt dissent in front of the American flag in the most famous photograph is her embrace of religious ritual and her exercising her right to rest. Tenderness is on display when Watson’s grandchild naps midafternoon or when we see her silhouette projected on the mirror behind her bedroom altar. Eyes closed, head down, Watson appears in a solo portrait again, but this time in prayer. Parks helps us see how, despite her economic poverty, surrounded by rows of neatly lined-up statues and candles, Watson made her home a sanctuary, a place where she, and maybe even he, for a time, could connect to something far better than the segregated country into which they both were born.

“I was in my very late teens when I was first made aware of the images,” Ella Watson’s great-granddaughter Rosslyn Samuels told me in an interview. “And I didn’t grasp the magnitude of it until my later years, because, to me, she was just Grandma.” When she saw Parks’s photographs, she said, “I thought, Oh, someone took professional pictures of her. I regret not knowing about them when she was alive, because she and I shared a bedroom, and we talked about everything.” Knowing Watson only as a retiree meant that Samuels’s primary memories of her great-grandmother are more like the photographs Parks took outside the office, the large majority of moments he documented: Watson as a loving, pious, nurturing Black woman who seemed to delight in looking after those she loved.

And here, Watson still inspires. “I get an overwhelming feeling when I look at Parks’s photographs of her now,” Samuels revealed. “It’s just like, ‘Wow.’ But … I’m not surprised, because she was always so big to us. She had that impact on a lot of people. We revered her. And it’s not like she commanded it; she just had a certain effect on people.”

Fortunately, one of them was a 29-year-old photographer named Gordon Parks.

(The Gordon Parks Foundation)

This article has been excerpted from “’She Was Always So Big to Us’: Ella Watson as Style and Substance," an essay by Salamishah Tillet, that appears in Gordon Parks's new book American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson.

When I was a kid, my best friend’s mother had a habit of singing arias to her houseplants. I did not know this at the time, but she was likely under the influence of The Secret Life of Plants, a 1973 best seller that claimed, among many other things, that plants enjoy classical music more than rock and practice a form of telepathy. Thanks to these nonsense claims, mainstream botany mostly avoided the debate of whether plants can, in any way, be considered intelligent. But recently, some scientists have begun to devise experiments that break down elements of this big, broad question: Can plants be said to hear? Sense touch? Communicate? Make decisions? Recognize kin?

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to staff writer Zoë Schlanger, author of the upcoming The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. How could a thing without a brain be considered intelligent? Should we expand our definition of intelligence to include such an alien variety of it? And if we do, how will that change us? Schlanger has spoken with dozens of botanists, from the most renegade to the most cautious, and she reports back on the state of the revolution in thinking.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Okay, so, you have a glowing petunia?

Zoë Schlanger: It was very thrilling to me because I got the first full-size petunia ever. I beat the influencers. I got it like three weeks early, organized a little exclusive on the petunia.

And the scientist who crafted the technology that made this possible hand delivered it to our offices in New York.

And so I just met him on the sidewalk, and I rushed up to our office, to the darkest part of our office, with this plant, which is the podcast recording studio, and turned out all the lights and waited, and then slowly my eyes adjusted.

It does take a minute for your eyes to, you know—our eyes are like cameras. The aperture has to sort of open to take in that low level of light. But once it did, you know—stunning experience to suddenly see your first glowing plant outside of a lab.

[Music]

Rosin: This is staff writer Zoë Schlanger. And what she’s describing is a real plant, the first commercially available houseplant that glows in the dark.

Schlanger: It glows in this very subdued, sort of matte way. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s a bit like moonlight. It’s very contained. You really have the sense that it’s glowing from within.

Rosin: Which, technically, it is. Scientists, including the one who delivered that plant to Zoë, borrowed a cluster of five genes—some from a bioluminescent fungus—and these genes somehow reroute the plant’s metabolism through a process that emits light.

The company that developed the plants sold out of their first run of 50,000 petunias. Probably, many of those will show up on your favorite Instagram feeds any minute. But Zoë wasn’t doing it for the ’Gram. She’s interested because she believes that the glowing petunias offer the first chance at breaking through a deep human bias.

Schlanger: I’m really interested in the ways that we, culturally, don’t really perceive plants as having as much vitality, let’s say, as animals.

To suddenly have this product available, where if people are clued into the fact that they’re looking at the plant’s metabolism activating when they see that glow, it kind of brings them into this realm of livingness in our minds.

You’re really seeing the plant being alive. It’s very much its livingness.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And I’m here today to tell you that your houseplant is not just alive but thinking—maybe. In her new book, The Light Eaters, Zoë Schlanger documents a revolution in the world of botany. Scientists—and these are respectable, academic scientists—are starting to ask themselves questions like: Can plants hear? Do they talk to each other? Are they intelligent?

Now, The Atlantic does not have a full-time plant reporter. Zoë’s actual beat for years has been climate change. But she was getting tired of the doom and gloom.

[Music]

Schlanger: As anyone who reads climate change news knows, it’s harrowing, and as a reporter, I was just sort of getting numb to this material.

Rosin: So Zoë went out looking for something that gave her the opposite of that feeling. And she found her thrill in—

Schlanger: Botany journals.

Rosin: Botany journals, which were, at this moment in history, so alive with a radical question.

Schlanger: Plant scientists were debating openly in journals about whether or not plants could be considered intelligent.

Rosin: Like, they were using the word intelligent?

Schlanger: Yes. There had been a few kind of rabble-rousing scientists who had formed an alliance to try and push this idea into the fore of their field. And because of that, there was a discussion of whether or not neurobiology could be altered as a field to apply to plants.

Rosin: Whoa. Okay. I have a loose sense that in the ’60s, there was a mushy idea that you could play music to your plants or that somehow you could communicate with your plants, and then there was some spirituality. But it wasn’t serious.

Schlanger: Totally. You are talking about an era in which a book called The Secret Life of Plants came out. That was more like ’73, but it was sort of bubbling up through the culture up until that point. And this book was full of that sort of a thing. It is one of the reasons people started talking to their plants, and it contained the claim that plants enjoy classical music more than rock and roll.

Rosin: Of course. Of course. Like babies. Like, everybody loves Beethoven.

Schlanger: Exactly. Makes them smarter. And it included a CIA agent who strapped a lie-detector test to his houseplant and then thought about burning it. And he says that his thoughts made the plant’s lie-detector test kind of go wild, suggesting it was reading his mind.

Rosin: Ooh. Okay.

Schlanger: This book was so popular. For the first time, botany had a pop-science book that captivated people—perfect for the new-age moment. But the problem was a lot of it was just not true.

Rosin: So it probably discredited the whole field of: Are plants intelligent?

Schlanger: It did. It made all of the institutions that fund this kind of science kind of clam up and get nervous and stop funding it.

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Schlanger: But, for sure, in the last 15 years, technology has come up so far that they are able to confirm things they had never previously been able to in the Secret Life of Plants era.

Rosin: And what are the kinds of things that are being debated?

Schlanger: The main debate is: Are plants behaving intentionally? Are plants behaving at all? Can they be said to behave when something doesn’t have a mind? You get into all these murky discussions of what intelligence really means.

If intelligence means responding in a way that has a good future outcome, then there’s probably a good argument for that.

But does intelligence mean a sort of more academic awareness of events and this more mushy quality of consciousness? Then you get into stranger territory.

And, science is a very conservative institution. Scientists don’t want to be using words that they can’t precisely define.

So this caused a lot of fights and is still causing fights. Nobody can quite decide how to refer to plants.

Rosin: So now, basically, plants are in this large, maybe post-Biblical-era debate about what else besides us could be said to be intelligent—like primates, dolphins, whales, pigs—that we’re used to. And maybe plants has now entered the legitimate realm of those discussions, rather than the far-out-there realm.

Schlanger: Yeah, plants have entered the consciousness chat, for sure.

Rosin: Oh my God, the consciousness chat.

[Music]

Schlanger: It’s very hard to make some of these plant-science findings tangible. The idea that, let’s say, a plant makes decisions or is communicating with airborne chemicals—you can’t see any of that.

Rosin: So what’s the first, say, surprising thing that your eyes were opened to once you started to look into it? Like, an ability or a skill or a thing that a plant could do that you didn’t know about before?

Schlanger: One of the biggest things was, I didn’t realize that plants could feel me touching them.

That was a big one. I, you know, pet my houseplants all the time.

Rosin: You do?

Schlanger: Yeah, you know, fresh leaves that have just come out—they’re really soft. It’s lovely. But now I think about that twice because I realize that there are sensors.

No one’s quite sure of the mechanics of this, but the plant has an ability to sense that touch and treat it like an assault. It might amp up its immune system to respond to that. It might change its growth pattern.

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Schlanger: From what we now know, many plants will ramp up their defenses when they’re touched too many times. That ultimately might mean a tougher exterior, a more flexible stem, or just an invisible cascade of chemicals to prevent infection.

[Music]

Rosin: So plants can sense touch, which isn’t intelligence in the same way that, say, writing a great book about plants is intelligence, but it is an element of intelligence—something like using one of your senses to make a decision. So let’s try another sense-related intelligence question: Do plants hear?

[Music]

Rosin: All right. So let’s get into one of the experiments. We’re going to listen to a sound here. I’m sorry, podcast people. This is a sound that people listening to shows hate, but here we go.

[Caterpillar audio]

Rosin: I actually think it’s kind of beautiful.

Schlanger: Mm-hmm.

Rosin: All right. What is that? What are we listening to?

Schlanger: You are listening to the delicious noises of a cabbage white caterpillar chewing on a leaf. This recording was taken by these two researchers named Rex Cocroft and Heidi Appel, and they study the world of phytoacoustics, or the way that plants respond to sound.

Rosin: Now, mind you, this isn’t an actual caterpillar chewing on an actual leaf. It’s a recording being played back to the plant.

Schlanger: So they recorded these caterpillars chewing and clipped little guitar pickups to the same plants. And these pickups vibrate the leaf at the same frequency, amplitude that the caterpillar’s mouth chewing the leaf would. And what they wanted to know was, would a plant respond to just the noise of their predator eating them, even if they weren’t really being eaten?

Rosin: Right. So not the smell or not the sensation of the caterpillar there, but just purely the sound.

Schlanger: Exactly. Because we already know other plants will detect the saliva of a caterpillar and respond. But they just really want to know, what is the role of sound in a plant’s life?

To their shock, honestly, the plants reacted by priming their chemical-defense systems. So when the researchers brought in real caterpillars, they were ready for them. They produced all these pesticides. They made their leaves unappetizing.

Rosin: Okay. I want to elaborate on how wild that is, because what do you mean the plant is listening to an acoustic recreation, amplification of a caterpillar? Like, how?

Schlanger: It’s astonishing to me too. The “how” of this is that sound is vibration.

Rosin: Ah.

Schlanger: So vibration is a physical stimulus. It’s a physical thing that the plant is encountering, which is kind of like how the hairs in our ears work. You know, they get hit by sound waves, and the hairs in our ears vibrate. And then that sends a message to our brain, and we perceive that as a sound.

Rosin: I can see the philosophical problem now. Because as you first started talking, the plant is vibrating—I’m thinking, Okay, it’s just reflex. Like, once you say that, it seems like no big deal. But then once you explain how we hear, then it doesn’t seem vastly different, except I guess you don’t have the brain to transmit the signal through. So that is different.

Schlanger: And that’s the boiling-hot core of the entire plant-science debate: How does the plant respond when there’s no centralized place for all these signals to go? How do you do this without a brain?

Rosin: I see. That then leads to the question of: Can you have intelligence, consciousness, decision-making without a brain?

Schlanger: Exactly. That gets into questions like: Is network intelligence possible? Do you need the signals to go to a centralized place, or can we accept a sort of more diffuse, whole-body awareness in the way that we think about a computer network?

Rosin: Okay. After the break, now that we’ve gotten to the core of it, I make Zoë go through a lightning round of questions.

Rosin: Do plants communicate with each other?

Do plants recognize their relatives?

This one is crazy: Do plants have personalities?

Rosin: And then we figure out: What are we supposed to do with all this expanding knowledge about plants? Never walk in a grassy field again? That’s coming up.

[Music]

Rosin: Okay, this is a lightning round of questions, but I want you to answer at the speed of plants—not necessarily quickly, because they’re big and interesting questions.

Do plants communicate with each other?

Schlanger: Plants do have ways of communicating with each other. They’re able to synthesize all these incredibly specific chemicals in their bodies to match different conditions. And then they project them out via their pores. And then other plants take them up via these little pores. They have these pores on the backs of their leaves that look like little fish lips. It’s very funny under a microscope. And that contains some information.

So if a plant is being eaten by caterpillars, it will synthesize a chemical that then alerts other plants to sort of up their defenses before the caterpillar or pest or whatever even reaches them.

And there’s some really interesting research coming out now around regional “dialects” in plants, which blows my mind. These researchers have found that fields of isolated plants can have what they’re calling regional dialects that are specific to that single field that’s a more specific version of the general, more universal language of that species.

Rosin: And when you say “dialects,” you mean they’re communicating with slight variations of a chemical, right? It’s not like, you know, they have different French accents or something.

Schlanger: Right. It’s a regional variation of how they use chemicals to send signals, although the term dialect is actually how the researchers themselves describe it.

Rosin: Okay, another wild question: Do plants recognize their relatives?

Schlanger: So kin recognition in plants is a fascinating field. It’s a very muddy field. We have parsed very little of this so far.

But we do know that sunflowers, for example—the traditional thinking with sunflowers is that you have to plant them quite far apart because otherwise they compete for resources so much that they try and shade each other out, so you end up with fewer sunflower seeds, which is not what sunflower farmers want. But certain research has found that when you place sunflowers with their genetic siblings, you can actually pack them so tightly because they will angle their stems to avoid shading each other.

Rosin: (Gasps.) You mean they don’t steal resources from their relatives? They, like, protect their own?

Schlanger: Exactly.

Rosin: That’s crazy.

Schlanger: And there’s clear evolutionary theory around this for higher animals, but we had not yet considered that for plants.

Rosin: So that’s, like, widely accepted?

Schlanger: Well, I wouldn’t say widely. (Laughs.) The caveats in this whole field are just unbelievable. But it’s also only been something that people have been considering for about 10 years, so it’s probably going to take another 20 before everyone’s like, Here’s how this works exactly.

Rosin: Okay, this one is crazy: Do plants have personalities?

Schlanger: So there’s some limited research emerging about variations in plant behavior and whether those variations do amount to a kind of personality.

We’re used to scientists studying what you might call personality in animals, where an individual animal is more quote-unquote “shy” or more quote-unquote “bold” than other members of their species. But one researcher has applied that framing to plants and found what he believes are similar variations there.

There’s some evidence to say that some plants are something like The Boy who Cried Wolf. They’ll kind of signal wildly at the slightest disturbance. And other plants are more reticent to do that. They’ll kind of wait for the disturbance to be really bad—for the pests to be really bothering them—before they let out their kind of distress call that alerts other plants to there being some kind of pest invasion.

Rosin: You know, the way you’re talking about plants—it really sounds like how we talk about people, like how people make decisions. Is it fair to call how some plants interact with the world decision-making?

Schlanger: So this is where I’d remind everyone that this is still a very new and very hotly debated area of science, especially when it comes to the language we use. And it’s easy to get into trouble when the language might make it sound like plants are people or plants have minds. They aren’t, and they don’t.

But what I will say is that after spending all this time with the research, there’s a lot of plant behavior that looks a lot like decision-making. Often these are very, very simple decisions, like, input: There’s water over there. Output: Let’s grow towards it. But it also shows how much we don’t know. For instance, we know some plants are capable of storing information and then acting based on that information later.

Or, you know, in some instances, plants can count and then choose to do an action based on a certain number of things. There’s a classic example that people call the memory of winter—that a plant needs to have a certain number of days of cold for it to then bloom in the spring.

Rosin: But why isn’t it just responding to sensations? Like, if we’re talking about the difference between reflex and intention, which is how I’m thinking about it, is it just a reflex? There’s heat, you know. It’s stored a certain amount of sunlight. I’m not sure what the reflex would be in response to, as opposed to the word you used, which was counting.

Schlanger: It comes down to a question of how far you need to distance what a plant is doing from what ourselves might be doing. There’s another example of counting plants in a Venus flytrap: They have all of these little hairs in their maw, in the leaves that snap closed, and it’s not enough for a little pebble to fall into that trap. It won’t close on a pebble. It needs multiple of those little hairs, those little trigger hairs touched. So it has to be a squirming animal that falls in there for the plant to bother closing. So it counts to at least five in that case.

[Watch ticking sound]

Schlanger: And then it counts time elapsed. If 30 seconds pass, and it doesn’t feel more movement, it’ll reset. But if the animal in there keeps moving, then they’re sure that they have a little fly or something, and digestion begins.

Rosin: Right.

Schlanger: And it tracks all this movement by counting how many hairs are triggered and over what amount of time. So that’s kind of math at another level that requires storage and addition in some ways.

Rosin: Okay, so I’m asking you this now straightforwardly: Are plants intelligent?

Schlanger: I, at this point, would say that they are, with the caveat that I came to this with a lot of skepticism of that perspective.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Schlanger: I’ve seen enough to feel like all of the hedging that people do around this is maybe a bit overblown. And the most important thing is that they’re not intelligent in the way we expect ourselves to be intelligent.

We’re dealing with an alien life form in a lot of ways. You wouldn’t expect aliens to have developed intelligence through the same routes as we did. But if we can expand our brains to sort of eliminate this human, academic version of intelligence, there’s no doubt they’re making choices for themselves.

And they’re doing that despite everything coming at them. They’re dealing with a very complicated, continually changing environment, and they’re spontaneously reacting to rise to the occasion.

Rosin: But, okay, so what does it matter? Like, we’re having a mini debate here about intelligence and maybe consciousness and decision-making and reflex. Like, it could be just semantics, so we’re arguing over definitions, but if we decide it’s reflexive, then what? And if we decide it’s a decision, then what?

Schlanger: If we decide this is all reflexive, then we all continue how the culture has always continued. That just regards plants as quasi-living, not particularly sentient, capable of interesting things, but ultimately closer to a rock an animal—closer to a rock than, like, a whale or something.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Schlanger: But if we decide that there’s some element of subjectivity in a plant, that starts to put them in a different category. I mean, it all is about how human culture responds to them.

So, we draw these kind of lines in the sand between animals and plants. And then within animals, we draw lines in the sand between intelligent animals and dumb animals. And, you know, it seems like every year we start admitting new animals into this category of creatures we consider intelligent or conscious—I mean, dogs and dolphins. And, you know, it’s been only a decade or so since we’ve accepted those things as conscious.

But in the last couple of years, we’re understanding that bees can, you know, have elaborate communication styles. They have this waggle dance that tells their hive mates where there’s good food sources, or they can actually detect different styles of art if they’re shown enough of the same pictures.

So how much farther down that ladder do you look in a way? What’s, like, past insects?

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Schlanger: What happens if we include plants in those categories? That opens up a lot of moral considerations. And then you have the potential for something like what we’ve seen with animal-rights movements.

It brings up the question of what happens if we have a plant-rights movement, which is actually something that legal experts are writing and thinking about right now. It introduces this interesting idea: What do we do about the fact that we’re animals that need to eat plants? There’s just no way around that.

Rosin: This seems like it really upends a lot of things that we just do routinely without thinking about it. Like, I was going to ask you: Do you still stroke your plants? I imagine you think twice about it now. That’s a small question.

Then there’s the slightly bigger question of: When you put a plant in a pot in your house, is that the equivalent, or does that have some resonance with keeping an animal in a cage?

And then I guess there’s the much bigger questions of, you know, broadly thinking about protecting plants on Earth.

Schlanger: Yeah, it’s interesting you bring up the potted houseplant example. I have come to some amount of consternation around this because after I did a lot of research around plant communication and how plants interact with other organisms below ground, how their roots are hooked in with fungi and other microbes, and how there’s all this information being transferred below ground. And then I look over to my many houseplants sitting in their discrete pots.

But I am soothed a bit because I’m looking at all these plants in my Brooklyn apartment, and they are all tropical varieties that have been raised in nurseries for probably generations.

And when you raise a plant in optimal conditions for several generations, it loses its hardiness. These plants are not going to survive without us at this point, the ones in our houses.

Rosin: (Laughs.) This seems like a dubious argument. This is like, this is a pet chinchilla that you bought that was raised in a, you know, from a family in a series of pet stores, and so—

Schlanger: I mean, you know, it’s a bit like our dogs and cats. We’ve created these domesticated species, and now they need us. And that’s the situation.

So that makes me feel better.

Rosin: Okay, that’s good. I can bear it more with dogs and cats. Like, they do have a—well, dogs anyway—they do have a centuries-old mutual dependence.

[Music]

Rosin: Do you walk around now and see nature just vibrating? Like, how do you see the world differently than you did before you started this?

Schlanger: I do walk into the park by my house very differently. I do have this new awareness that there’s all of this drama going on around me.

Rosin: I feel like I’m going to have a hard time stepping on grass now.

Schlanger: Yeah, they know you’re doing that, and they hate it. (Laughs.)

Rosin: No, stop!

Schlanger: But, I mean, caveat to the being worried about harming plants thing: We layer all of our human feelings onto this situation and all this new awareness we have about plants. The truth is plants are modular. They’re designed to lose a limb and be fine.

You know, you cut grass; it grows right back. That’s not killing the organism. You can’t cut our arm off and it not have any consequences. But plants are designed to have this kind of diffuse, modular capacity to just grow a new arm.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Schlanger: But it does introduce this kind of sense of wonder, that plants are no longer a background decoration in my life. They’re no longer this kind of general wash of green. I’m really aware that there’s all these individuals. There’s all of these distinct species. There’s all of this biological creativity, all this kind of evolutionary nuance that is playing out all around me.

You know, it has the effect of unseating us a little bit from this assumption that we’re sitting sort of on the top of the evolutionary heap.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Schlanger: Once you start to realize the incredible evolutionary fine-tuning that goes into plants, it kind shifts the ground beneath humanity to settle us a little more among other species, and it’s a humbling realization that I think our species could use a lot more of.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

On a freezing day in December 2021, I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, to visit Simon Gilroy’s lab. In one room of the lab sat a flat of young tobacco and Arabidopsis plants, each imbued with fluorescent proteins derived from jellyfish.

Researchers led me into a small microscope room. One of them turned off the lights, and another handed me a pair of tweezers that had been dipped in a solution of glutamate—one of the most important neurotransmitters in our brains and, research has recently found, one that boosts plants’ signals too. “Be sure to cross the midrib,” Jessica Cisneros Fernandez, then a molecular biologist on Gilroy’s team, told me. She pointed to the thick vein running down the middle of a tiny leaf. This vein is the plant’s information superhighway. Injure the vein, and the pulse will move all over the plant in a wave. I pinched hard.

On a screen attached to the microscope, I watched the plant light up, its veins blazing like a neon sign. As the green glow moved from the wound site outward in a fluorescent ripple, I was reminded of the branching pattern of human nerves. The plant was becoming aware, in its own way, of my touch.

But what exactly does it mean for a plant to be aware ? Consciousness was once seen as belonging solely to humans and a short list of nonhuman animals that clearly act with intention. Yet seemingly everywhere researchers look, they are finding that there is more to the inner lives of animals than we ever thought possible. Scientists now talk regularly about animal cognition; they study the behaviors of individual animals, and occasionally ascribe personalities to them.

Some scientists now posit that plants should likewise be considered intelligent. Plants have been found to show sensitivity to sound, store information to be accessed later, and communicate among their kind—and even, in a sense, with particular animals. We determine intelligence in ourselves and certain other species through inference—by observing how an organism behaves, not by looking for a psychological sign. If plants can do things that we consider indications of intelligence in animals, this camp of botanists argues, then why shouldn’t we use the language of intelligence to describe them too?

[From the July/August 2021 issue: A better way to look at trees]

It’s a daring question, currently being debated in labs and academic journals. Not so long ago, treading even lightly in this domain could upend a scientist’s career. And plenty of botanists still think that applying concepts such as consciousness to plants does a disservice to their essential plantness. Yet even many of these scientists are awed by what we are learning about plants’ capabilities.

A single book nearly snuffed out the field of plant-behavior research for good. The Secret Life of Plants, published in 1973, was as popular as it was irresponsible; though it included real science, it also featured wildly unscientific projection. One chapter suggested that plants could feel and hear—and that they preferred Beethoven to rock and roll. Another suggested that a plant could respond to malevolent thoughts.

Many scientists tried to reproduce the most tantalizing “research” presented in The Secret Life of Plants, to no avail. According to several researchers I spoke with, this caused the twin gatekeepers of science-funding boards and peer-review boards to become skittish about plant-behavior studies. Proposals with so much as a whiff of inquiry into the subject were turned down. Pioneers in the field changed course or left the sciences altogether.

A decade after the book’s publication, a paper by David Rhoades, a zoologist and chemist at the University of Washington, reopened questions of plant communication. Rhoades had watched a nearby forest be decimated by an invasion of caterpillars. But then something suddenly changed; the caterpillars began to die. Why? The answer, Rhoades discovered, was that the trees were communicating with one another. Trees that the caterpillars hadn’t yet reached were ready: They’d changed the composition of their leaves, turning them into weapons that would poison, and eventually kill, the caterpillars.

Scientists were beginning to understand that trees communicate through their roots, but this was different. The trees, too far apart to be connected by a root system, were signaling to one another through the air. Plants are tremendous at chemical synthesis, Rhoades knew. And certain plant chemicals drift through the air. Everyone already understood that ripening fruit produces airborne ethylene, for example, which prompts nearby fruit to ripen too. It wasn’t unreasonable to imagine that plant chemicals containing other information—say, that the forest was under attack—might also drift through the air.

[Read: A glowing petunia could radicalize your view of plants]

Still, the idea that a plant would defend itself in this way was heretical to the whole premise of how scientists thought plants worked. Plants were not supposed to be that active, or have such dramatic and strategic reactions. Rhoades presented his hypothesis at conferences, but mainstream scientific journals were reluctant to take the risk of publishing something so outlandish. The discovery ended up buried in an obscure volume, and Rhoades was ridiculed by peers in journals and at conferences.

But Rhoades’s communication experiments, and others that came immediately after, helped establish new lines of inquiry. We now know that plants’ chemical signals are decipherable not just by other plants but in some cases by insects. Still, four decades on, the idea that plants might communicate intentionally with one another remains a controversial concept in botany.

One key problem is that there is no agreed-upon definition of communication, not even in animals. Does a signal need to be sent purposefully? Does it need to provoke a response in the receiver? Much as consciousness and intelligence have no settled definition, communication slip-slides between the realms of philosophy and science, finding secure footing in neither. Intention poses the hardest of problems, because it cannot be directly determined.

[From the March 2019 issue: A journey into the animal mind]

The likely impossibility of establishing intentionality in plants, though, is no deterrent to Simon Gilroy’s sense of wonder at their liveliness. In the ’80s, Gilroy, who is British, studied at Edinburgh University under Anthony Trewavas, a renowned plant physiologist. Since then, Trewavas has begun using provocative language to talk about plants, aligning himself with a group of botanists and biologists who call themselves plant neurobiologists, and publishing papers and a book laying out scientific arguments in favor of plant intelligence and consciousness. Gilroy himself is more circumspect, unwilling to talk about either of those things, but he still works with Trewavas. Recently, the two have been developing a theory of agency for plants.

Gilroy is quick to remind me that he is talking strictly about biological agency, not implying intention in a thoughts-and-feelings sense. But there’s no question that plants are engaged in the active pursuit of their own goals and, in the process, shape the very environment they find themselves rooted in. That, for him, is proof of plants’ agency. Still, the proof is found through inferring the meaning behind plants’ actions rather than understanding their mechanics.

“When you get down to the machinery that allows those calculations to occur, we don’t have the luxury of going, Ah, it’s neurons in the brain,” Gilroy told me. His work is beginning to allow us to watch the information processing happen, “but at the moment, we don’t know how it works.”

That is the essential question of plant intelligence: How does something without a brain coordinate a response to stimuli? How does information about the world get translated into action that benefits the plant? How can the plant sense its world without a centralized place to parse that information?

A few years back, Gilroy and his colleague Masatsugu Toyota thought they’d have a go at those questions, which led them to the experiment I participated in at the lab. Their work has shown that those glowing-green signals move much faster than would be expected from simple diffusion. They move at the speed of some electrical signals, which they may be. Or, as new research suggests, they may be surprisingly fast chemical signals.

Given what we know about the dynamics of sensing in creatures that have a brain, the lack of one should mean that any information generated from sensing ought to ripple meaninglessly through the plant body without producing more than a highly localized response. But it doesn’t. A tobacco plant touched in one place will experience that stimulus throughout its whole body.

The system overall works a bit like an animal nervous system, and might even employ similar molecular players. Gilroy, for his part, does not want to call it a nervous system, but others have written that he and Toyota have found “nervous system–like signaling” in plants. The issue has even leaked out of plant science: Researchers from other disciplines are weighing in. Rodolfo Llinás, a neuroscientist at NYU, and Sergio Miguel Tomé, a colleague at the University of Salamanca, in Spain, have argued that it makes no sense to define a nervous system as something only animals can have rather than defining it as a physiological system that could be present in other organisms, if in a different form.

Convergent evolution, they argue, wherein organisms separately evolve similar systems to deal with similar challenges, happens all the time; a classic example is wings. Flight evolved separately in birds, bats, and insects, but to comparable effect. Eyes are another example; the eye lens has evolved separately several times.

The nervous system can reasonably be imagined as another case of convergent evolution, Llinás and Miguel Tomé say. If a variety of nervous systems exist in nature, then what plants have is clearly one. Why not call it a nervous system already?

“What do you mean, the flower remembers?” I ask.

It’s 2019, and I’m walking through the Berlin Botanic Garden with Tilo Henning, a plant researcher. Henning shakes his head and laughs. He doesn’t know. No one does. But yes, he says, he and his colleague Maximilian Weigend, the director of a botanical garden in Bonn, have observed the ability of Nasa poissoniana—a plant in the flowering Loasaceae family that grows in the Peruvian Andes—to store and recall information.

The pair noticed that the multicolor starburst-shaped flowers were raising their stamen, or fertilizing organs, shortly before a pollinator arrived, as if they could predict the future. The researchers set up an experiment and found that the plant in fact seemed to be learning from experience. These flowers, Henning and Weigend found, could “remember” the time intervals between bee visits, and anticipate the time their next pollinator was likely to arrive. If the interval between bee visits changed, the plant might actually adjust the timing of its stamen display to line up with the new schedule.

In a 2019 paper, Henning and Weigend call Nasa poissoniana’s behavior “intelligent,” the word still appearing in quotation marks. I want to know what Henning really thinks. Are plants intelligent? Does he see the flower’s apparent ability to remember as a hallmark of consciousness? Or does he think of the plant as an unconscious robot with a preprogrammed suite of responses?

Henning shakes off my question the first two times I ask it. But the third time, he stops walking and turns to answer. The dissenting papers, he says, are all focused on the lack of brains—no brains, they claim, means no intelligence.

“Plants don’t have these structures, obviously,” Henning says. “But look at what they do. I mean, they take information from the outside world. They process. They make decisions. And they perform. They take everything into account, and they transform it into a reaction. And this, to me, is the basic definition of intelligence. That’s not just automatism. There might be some automatic things, like going toward light. But this is not the case here. It’s not automatic.”

Where Nasa poissoniana’s “memories” could possibly be stored is still a mystery. “Maybe we are just not able to see these structures,” Henning tells me. “Maybe they are so spread all over the body of the plant that there isn’t a single structure. Maybe that’s their trick. Maybe it’s the whole organism.”

It’s humbling to remember that plants are a kingdom of life entirely their own, the product of riotous evolutionary innovation that took a turn away from our branch of life when we were both barely motile, single-celled creatures floating in the prehistoric ocean. We couldn’t be more biologically different. And yet plants’ patterns and rhythms have resonances with ours—just look at the information moving through Gilroy’s glowing specimens.

Mysteries abide, of course. We are far from understanding the extent of “memory” in plants. We have a few clues and fewer answers, and so many more experiments still to try.

This article was adapted from Zoë Schlanger’s new book, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. It appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Mysteries of Plant ‘Intelligence.’”

My father collects 100-year-old magazines about Palestine—Life, National Geographic, even The Illustrated London News, the world’s first graphic weekly news magazine. For years, he would talk about these mysterious documents but rarely show them to anyone. “I have proof,” he would say, “that Palestine exists.”

His father, my paternal grandfather, whom I called Siddi, had a similar compulsion to prove his heritage, though it manifested differently. Siddi used to randomly recite his family tree to my father when he was a child. As if answering a question that had not been asked, he would recount those who came before him: “First there was Hassan,” he would say in his thick Arabic accent, “and then there was Simri.” Following fathers and sons down the line of paternity, in a rhythm much like that of a prayer, he told the story of 11 generations. Every generation until my father’s was born and raised in Ramallah, Palestine.

After 1948, however, almost our entire family in Ramallah moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. Although my American-born father didn’t inherit Siddi’s habit of reciting his family tree, he did recite facts; he lectured me about Palestine ad nauseam in my youth, although he had not yet visited. Similar to his father’s, these speeches were unprompted. “Your Siddi only had one business partner his entire life,” he would say for the hundredth time. “And that business partner was a rabbi. Palestinians are getting pitted against the Jews because it’s convenient, but it’s not the truth.”

His lectures were tedious, repetitive, and often fueled with so much passion that they overwhelmed me into silence. And yet they took up permanent residence in my brain, and I would reach for them when pressed to give political opinions after new acquaintances found out I was Palestinian. “So what do the Palestinians even want?” a co-worker’s husband once asked me as we waited in line for the bar at my company’s holiday party. I said what I imagined my father would have said in the face of such dismissiveness: “The right to live on their land in peace.”

But sometime after the luster of young adulthood wore off, I found my piecemeal understanding of Palestinian history—what I’d gleaned from passively listening to my father—no longer sufficient when navigating these conversations. When a man I was on a date with learned where my olive skin and dark hair came from, he told me that Palestinians “were invented,” even though I was sitting right in front of him, sharing a bowl of guacamole. I left furious, mostly at myself. I had nothing thoughtful to say to prove otherwise.

Like my father, I started collecting my own box of scraps about Palestine, although I couldn’t have said why. Perhaps I wanted to slice through a conversation just as others had sliced through my existence, but not even this was clear to me yet. Magazines, books, old posters, and stickers found a home in a corner of my bedroom. My collecting was an obsession. I’d buy books by Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti, not necessarily because I knew who these men were at the time, but because the word Palestine was right there, embossed on the cover.

At first I didn’t dare open these books. They became an homage to my identity that I both eagerly honored and wanted to ignore. My eventual engagement with the material was slow, deliberate. I wanted to preserve a semblance of ease that I feared I would lose once I learned more about my people’s history. I bookmarked articles on Palestine in my browser, creating a haphazard folder of links that included infographics on Palestine’s olive-oil industry, news clippings about the latest Israeli laws that discriminated against Palestinians, and articles on JSTOR with provocative titles like “Myths About Palestinians.” I was building an archive as if I were putting together an earthquake kit—like the ones my parents kept in our basement in San Francisco—even though I didn’t know when this particular survival kit would be useful or necessary.  

But my father knew. His father knew. Our liberation may eventually hang on these various archives.

Even more true: These archives validate Palestinians’ existence.  

In the 19th century, before a wave of European Jews settled in Palestine following the Holocaust, early Zionists leaned on the mythology that the land was empty and barren. The movement advocated for the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland. In 1901, the Zionist author Israel Zangwill wrote in the British monthly periodical The New Liberal Review that Palestine was “a country without people; the Jews are a people without a country.”

In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was quoted in The Sunday Times of London: “[There is] no such thing as Palestinians … It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” This idea has been similarly reused for more than a century, evolving very little. As recently as February 2024, Israeli Minister of Settlement and National Missions Orit Strock repeated the sentiment during a meeting of Israel’s Parliament, saying, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.”

But this fiction of Palestinians’ nonexistence feels tired. It’s a distraction that not only invalidates us but also places Palestinians on the defensive while Israel’s government builds walls and expands illegal settlements that separate Israelis from their very real Palestinian neighbors.

It feels especially absurd in the face of Israel’s latest military campaign in Gaza, launched in response to Hamas’s attacks on October 7. Since then, Israeli strikes have killed more than 34,000 people, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, although that number is incomplete. It does not include all of the civilians who have died from hunger, disease, or lack of medical treatment. If Palestinians don’t exist, then who is dying? I fear that Strock’s words may become true, that Palestinians soon will not exist, that slowly they will become extinct. It’s a cruel self-fulfilling prophecy—claim that Palestinians were never there, and do away with them when they continue to prove otherwise.

While listening to my father’s monologues, I used to think about how exhausting it must be for him to keep reminding himself that the place where his father was born is real. At the time, I didn’t think about my place in this heartbreak. But I can’t ignore that heartbreak any longer.

Since October, I’ve returned to my own little box on Palestine. I used to think that this haphazard archive lacked direction, but I see it differently now. This collection proves to me that the place where my great-grandfather owned orchards and grew oranges was real, that the land Siddi was forced to leave behind was a blooming desert before others claimed its harvest. It’s also a catalog of my own awakening, a coming to terms with a history that I didn’t want to know. My ignorance is shattered over and over again when I look through this box and think about all that we are losing today.

Gaza is considered one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in the world; some of its monuments date back to Byzantine, Greek, and Islamic times. Since the October 7 attacks, however, Israel’s air raids on Gaza have demolished or damaged roughly 200 historical sites, including libraries, hundreds of mosques, a harbor dating back to 800 B.C.E., and one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world. In December, an Israeli strike destroyed the Omari Mosque, the oldest and largest mosque in Gaza City, which housed dozens of rare ancient manuscripts. Israeli strikes have endangered Gaza’s remaining Christian population, considered one of the oldest in the world, and have destroyed every university while killing more than 90 prominent academics.

The destruction of cultural heritage is not new in the history of war. Perhaps that’s why when my father came across a tattered hardcover titled Village Life in Palestine, a detailed account of life in the Holy Land in the late 1800s, in a used-book store in Cork, Ireland, he immediately purchased it. He knew that books like these were sacred artifacts that hold a truth—a proof of existence outside political narratives. My father’s copy was printed by the London publishing company Longmans, Green, and Co. in 1905. The first few pages of the book contain a library record and a stamp that reads CANCELLED. Below is another stamp with the date: March 9, 1948. I’m not sure if that date—mere months before the creation of Israel—signifies when it was pulled out of circulation, or the last time it was checked out. But the word cancelled feels purposeful. It feels like another act of erasure, a link between my father’s collection and the growing list of historical sites in Gaza now destroyed. We are losing our history and, with that, the very record of those who came before us.

After I started my own collection on Palestine, my father entrusted me with some of his scanned copies of Life that mention Palestine. He waited to show them to me, as if passing on an heirloom. Perhaps he wanted to be sure I was ready or that I could do something with them. One of the magazines dates back to May 10, 1948, four days before the creation of Israel. There’s a headline that reads, “The Captured Port of Haifa Is Key to the Jews’ Strategy.” The author goes on to write that the port “improved Jews’ strategic position in Palestine. It gave them complete control of a long coastal strip south to Tel Aviv … They could look forward to shipments of heavy military equipment from their busy supporters abroad.” Right next to this text is a picture of Palestinian refugees with the caption “Arab Refugees, crammed aboard a British lighter in the harbor at Haifa, wait to be ferried across the bay to the Arab-held city of Acre. They were permitted to take what possessions they could but were stripped of all weapons.”

I can’t help but feel the echo of this history today. I think about President Joe Biden’s plans to build a temporary port in Gaza to allow humanitarian aid in, even though about 7,000 aid trucks stand ready in Egypt’s North Sinai province. Back in October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to welcome the idea of letting help arrive by sea,which at first confused me because not only has he denied that Palestinians are starving, but his government has also been accused by the United Nations and other humanitarian groups of blocking aid trucks from entering Gaza (a claim that Israel denies). Nevertheless, the historical echo seems quite clear to me now as I look through my father’s magazine and see refugees leaving by port 75 years earlier.

I believe my father didn’t want to be alone in his recordkeeping. Who would? It’s endlessly depressing to have to write yourself and your people into existence. But writing about Palestine no longer feels like a choice. It feels like a compulsion. It’s the same drive that I imagine led Siddi to recite his family tree over and over, a self-preservation method that reminded him, just as much as it reminded his young son, of where they came from. It’s the same compulsion that inspires my father to collect the rubble of history and build a library from it.

This impulse is reactive, yes, a response to the repeated denial of Palestine’s existence, but it’s also an act of faith—faith that one day all of this work will be useful, will finally be put on display as part of a new archive that corrects a systematically denied history. Sometimes I hear my father say that his magazines and books will one day be in a museum about Palestine.

“Your brother will open one, and these will be there,” he muses to himself.

Just as the compulsion to archive is contagious, so is hope. Since I’ve started publishing articles and essays about Palestine, I’ve had close and distant relatives reach out to me and offer to share pieces from their own collections.

They ship me large boxes of books and newspapers, packed up from the recesses of their parents’ homes. “Can you do something with these?” they ask. My answer is always yes. I’m realizing that this archiving is not only work I have to do, but something I get to do.

In the middle of the night, my father sends me subjectless emails with links to articles or scanned copies of magazines about Palestine that he’s been waiting to show to someone, anyone, who will care. I save each email in a folder in my Gmail account labeled “Palestine”—a digital version of the box in my bedroom, an archive that I return to whenever I feel despair.

“It’s all here,” my father writes. “We existed. We were there.”