I wasn’t planning to write anything today. Honestly. I was just scrolling, the way you do when you’re somewhere between bored and restless, and I came across a photo—just a simple photo—of a young girl in Amman feeding stray cats near an old bookstore. That was it. Nothing dramatic. No explosion. No screaming headline.
But I kept staring at that photo. The dust in the background, the bent metal sign behind her, the way she looked so focused, like the cats were her entire world. And it hit me—this is what we forget. This is what gets lost in the noise of “breaking news” and political statements and whatever the hell went viral on Twitter that morning.
Not everything has to break to be news. Sometimes the quiet things matter more. The smell of cardamom in someone’s living room. The handwritten signs at a protest that never made it past five people. The street artists in Tunis who paint walls that get repainted again the next week. These things don’t trend. But they stay.
Arab Post Online isn’t trying to be the loudest voice in the room. There are enough of those already. We’re here for the overlooked, the under-glorified, the stories that might only matter to five people—and that’s still enough. If one person feels seen because of something we shared, that’s the win.
Last week someone emailed us a poem. No punctuation, all lowercase, in broken English. It was about their grandmother in Homs and the way she used to burn rice on purpose because the crispy bits reminded her of home. I read it three times. I cried the second time. I didn’t even know why. Maybe it reminded me of my own grandmother. Or maybe it just felt real. Raw. Unedited.
There’s a kind of honesty in imperfection, and we’re not here to edit that out. This isn’t the place for SEO-optimized blurbs or AI-generated summaries (ironic, I know, me writing this here). This is where the broken edges are left intact. Where things don’t have to make sense to be meaningful.
So yeah, we’ll post about a street musician in Beirut who only knows two chords but plays like it’s a stadium. Or about a cafe owner in Gaza who painted her entire shop yellow just because “it looked like sunlight.” Or someone’s thoughts at 2AM after a blackout in Baghdad.
If you’re looking for polished, this probably isn’t the right place. But if you’re okay with rough edges, with stories that drift a little, with feelings you can’t fully name—then welcome. We’re glad you’re here.
Because maybe—just maybe—not everything has to be big to be important.
