Al-Assad Is Gone, and One Idea Fills My Brain On Sunday at 3 a.m. my mother woke me with a shaky voice. All our phones were ringing and the TV was loud. “He fell, Zaina, he fell. Assad fell.”

What song fills you with existential dread? For me, it’s Dmitri Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2, it often plays in my head whenever I can’t sleep at night because of worldly problems, because I realize this was not the life we were meant to live as human beings who are inherently so kind and so very beautiful. It’s the “main theme” of me kind of realizing how unfair this world is and how disgu…