our beirut correspondent

I meant to post this story two weeks ago, but unlike much of what's printed in the pages of a newspaper, its value is not time-bound. Anthony Shadid is best known for his reporting from Baghdad, which gave birth to his excellent, heartbreaking book Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (last month I heard him speak about it in NY; a recroding of the event is available here). But he's now based in Lebanon again, and his reporting from Beirut is one of the best reasons to be reading the Washington Post. Here, he writes about an intriguing anti-sectarianism advertising campaign, one that draws on visual tactics familiar to those of us whose activist awakenings were surrounded by subvertising and billboard liberation and sticker graffiti:

Part provocation, part appeal -- with a dose of farce that doesn't feel all that farcical -- advertisements went up this month on 300 billboards across the Lebanese capital and appeared in virtually every newspaper in the country. Thousands of e-mails carried the ads across the Internet to expatriates. Each offered its take on what one of the campaign's creative directors called a country on the verge of "absurdistan" -- cooking lessons by Greek Orthodox, building for sale to Druze, hairstyling by an Armenian Catholic, a fashion agency looking for "a beautiful Shiite face." At the bottom, the ads read in English, "Stop sectarianism before it stops us," or, more bluntly in Arabic, "Citizenship is not sectarianism."

The Beirutis who came up with the campaign (who are roughly my age--they, too, are products of the same media-saturated activist milieu) hope to take it a step further, reaching out both to MPs and to a general audience in the public space. If you're curious about the origins of politicized sectarianism in patchwork Lebanon (and academically inclined enough to read a many-footnoted monograph) Ussama Makdisi's brilliant--and freely available online--book is indispensable.

Additionally, Sean of The Human Province has been posting photo-rich first-person accounts of the ongoing protests organized by Hizbullah and its allies--including some non-Shi'a parties--to peacefully pressure the Siniora government to step down. Scroll down to find the relevant posts--they'll tell you more than much of the coverage (Shadid and his calibre aside) that's appearing in American papers. I recommend this post and this other, in particular.