Here we are in the last days of a relentless winter. I write this on the morning of Sunday, March 8, 2026, Daylight Saving Time. Birds are chirping, and the heaps of snow are quickly melting.

In this arrival of spring, another war appears to be unfolding, this time in the Middle East between Israel—with the support of the United States and several Western allies—and Iran. I cannot say that I am surprised; the two countries have been engaged in a shadow conflict for decades, carried out through proxy wars, covert strikes, and increasingly open threats. Yet I am still stunned. Over the past days, I have watched videos circulating online: footage of explosions near Dubai’s port (1) and clips from Tehran showing plumes of smoke rising above the city (2).

There is so much I do not know or understand about the Middle East, but it has been a presence in my mind since my earliest memories of watching the news with my parents. As someone interested in how nations begin, I know that many of the foundations of what we call the West originate in the regions surrounding the Middle East—the stories of the Hebrew Bible, the emergence of Christianity in Roman Palestine, and the philosophical traditions that passed between Greece, Persia, and the early Islamic world.

From this region, one can trace how ideas and values migrate east and west. Greek philosophy passed through the Islamic world and eventually returned to Europe through centuries of translation and intellectual exchange. Religious traditions spread outward, transforming as they traveled. In many ways, the world’s intellectual and spiritual currents pass through the Middle East. Perhaps this is why this war feels immediately consequential, even as my own understanding of the region remains incomplete—close enough to feel its gravity, yet distant enough that much of it remains abstract.

The movement of ideas is not the only thing that circulates across the globe. Goods, energy, and waste move through their own systems of exchange, following routes that are often invisible until they accumulate somewhere.

This artist book is enclosed in a red box designed to resemble a shipping container. When opened, it reveals a diagram by Holly Greene tracing the ocean currents that gather debris into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This “thing,” assembled from humanity’s waste, has an almost mythological quality, which is why we include, on two Möbius strips, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s nineteenth-century poem The Kraken. As you turn the strip of paper in your hands, I hope the tentacled monster of Tennyson’s imagination begins to echo the strange accumulation of debris drifting across the Pacific.

– From the publisher