The Beirut That Was
12 min readAug 14, 2020
A mushroom cloud is a powerful way to inaugurate the birth of a new era. Seventy-five years to the week after the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled the birth of the American era in world politics, an explosion of equal visual intensity marked the end of the Beirut that so many successive generations had come to love.
What was Beirut?
