Drafting Defeat republishes a collection of Al Istakhri’s highly stylized 10th century maps of the Middle East, printed with the legends that accompanied them in a 1933 Soviet edition of Persian bureaucrat Nasser Khosrow’s Safarnameh (Book of Travels).

A series of short essays by Payam Sharifi exploring the clash of civilizations between the US and Iran across such cultural phenomena as the monobrow, soft drugs, and men’s ties. Excerpts from a forthcoming book.