About

I'm Elliott D. Paige. I write about culture, diaspora, film, and the places that made us.

For a long time, this was a travel blog. It isn't anymore ... or rather, the travel was always the smaller part of what I was actually interested in. What I keep coming back to is belonging: what we carry across distance, what gets lost in the crossing, and the stories a place tells about itself versus the ones it forgets. So that's what this is now. Essays on identity and the long passage home, on film and the politics of who gets to be on screen, on the cultural economy underneath all of it, and sometimes just on a place worth describing well.

I'm also building things. I co-founded Smadi, a multilingual streaming platform for diaspora audiences who have spent too long watching themselves not exist in other people's stories. More to come on this project. The writing here runs through all of it — not as advertising, but because the ideas came first and the ventures are what I'm doing about them. There's more on the Work page.

If you want the essays as they come, the newsletter is the way. No noise, no schedule, just writing when there's something worth saying.

Reading / watching:

Currently Reading: An African History of Africa, by Zeinab Badawi; Dune, by Frank Herbert.

On Hold for: Theft, by Abdulrazak Gurnah; The Dream Hotel, by Laila Lalami; and The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron.

Recently read: Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng; Notes on Grief, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; and Homno Deus, Yuval Noah Harari

Currently watching: Pursuit of Jade (2026); Rooster (2026); and Veil of Shadows (2026).

Recently watched: Demascus (2025); Queen Cleopatra (2023); and The Comeback (2005)

Want to know more about me? Read the longer story →