Other Voices, Other Geniuses: Youmna Chamieh
Come for xi, stay for lucy
Youmna Chamieh is a bright and brilliant young writer whom we as a society have decided to tolerate even though she is Gen Z and went to Harvard. That’s two strikes, Youmna! If I find out you’re a nepo baby I stg…
Nah but freal, she’s Lebanese, grew up in Paris (!) and has graciously given her words to this humble newsletter despite being literally the editor in chief of an actual publication, Guernica, which makes her a NYC Lit Girl, a thing I tried so long and so hard to be, and only succeeded in collecting — but never reading — a few issues of n+1. Ask me about all the The Cut essays I left on the, ahem, cutting room floor. Hmm, my puns and professional frustrations are actually not the point here? Weird!
You can check out more of Youmna’s work here, or you could just keep reading, the choice is entirely yours. And with that, take it away Miz Chamieh…
Other Voices, Other Geniuses: Youmna Chamieh
What song are you especially into currently?
Fade Into You by Mazzy Star. I discovered it thanks to this weather report a friend sent me after David Lynch’s passing, and I’ve been listening to it almost every night since. It has the same chord progression as two of my other all-time favorites, Knocking on Heaven’s Door and Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby, so I love that I get to wade between all three whenever I sing to one. I never managed a proper braid as a kid and the head priest hated me in catechism lessons so I’m happy that at twenty-five I’ve finally found a trinity I can work with.
What is your greatest pet peeve?
Thank you so much for this question. All of 2025 I’ve waited for someone to invite me to list my pet peeves. I present as a pretty sweet girl, but my inner monologue is 99% disgruntled old man, I swear.
For starters, when autocorrect changes “omw” to “On my way!” like you’re some sort of bootlicker or you have a really shrill voice or something.
Also, Captcha tests.
Socks that slowly slide down inside your shoes while you’re walking.
People who eat boiled eggs in a public place. (Last weekend I was at the theater and a woman opened a Tupperware filled to the brim with boiled eggs.)
People whose teeth clank against the spoon when they drink soup.
People who talk during movies.
Or check their phones during movies.
Or laugh to show that they’ve understood the joke even if the joke wasn’t funny during movies. (I tend to go to the movies alone.)
Close talkers and hoverers, obviously.
But perhaps the winner is those people who simply cannot let others be great. I’m talking about the “wow that player’s amazing” / “yeah, he has a really great build for basketball” guy. You know him. Personally I met him this January. Typically to be found in the bleachers, sitting next to you, with a coney in one hand and a hard seltzer in the other. Rarely on the court—because of his build, naturally.
What is the trait within yourself about which you feel the most ambivalent?
I feel pretty ambivalent about my childishness. On the one hand, I do really enjoy moving through life as if at any moment I could step out of this makeshift ball pit I’ve constructed for myself and back into the real world, rather than the reverse. And besides focused and authentic work, I love play, games, and useless activity more than almost anything else.
But on the other hand, I know there is something slightly counterfeit about this part of my personality. A form of false cheer, like a host continuing to swipe more songs into the queue even after the party’s clearly over and the only two people left are a crying girl on the couch and the friend consoling her. The truth is that I am pretty depressed about the fact that my childhood is over. Pretty depressed, too, about the fact that my adolescence is over. And at times I wonder if I am not dealing with this loss, the passage of time, wrong. Perhaps one has an easier time with things disappearing if they remain disappeared, and don’t come back in bastard forms. Perhaps I am only making things worse for myself by continuing to speak to a wooden-puppet-held-together-with-chicken-string version of my childhood, which, as anyone who’s read the grown-up version of Pinocchio knows, is far more disturbing a project than speaking to no one at all.
How do you like to waste time?
Playing Snake ’97. It’s an iPhone app remake of the iconic original Snake they had on the Nokia 3310, my first phone. The iPhone app has it all: the dot-matrix display, the number controls, the monotone sounds (bleep bleep etc.) For the last few years my high score had plateaued at 1460, achieved on an otherwise disastrous friend trip to Sicily where everyone had recently broken up and we all hated each other so much that we were always gazing out at the sea as if to will a boat into being. But recently I upped that to 1580 thanks to a disturbance on the G train. There are two things about the game I love. First, the rules. Most of the time you have to eat permanent little pellets; but every five pellets you get the chance to shoot for a temporary insect worth many more points, thus coupling the satisfaction of a stable streak with the thrill of a winning wager. It wouldn’t be a stretch, in that regard, to call Snake an elegant game. And second, I love that Snake ’97, specifically, embodies a certain panache, a certain resistance to time’s authority over us. The game reminds me of this neighbor my family and I used to have in Paris, a personal injury lawyer who was balder than a ping pong ball but always wore this really lush, really shiny adhesive black wig. The Nokia 3310 was gone, and by God so was that man’s hair, but fuck it, said my Snake ’97 and his black curls—life is something to prevail upon.
What celebrity do you genuinely think you could get with if you met under the right circumstances?
Xi Jinping.
And to tell you the truth, I don’t even think the circumstances would have to be that right. I think I could get with Xi Jinping if I met him at the Starbucks near my place. And I met him in the bathroom line of that Starbucks, and I had a square of toilet paper stuck to the sole of my shoe, and when Xi Jinping asked me for the bathroom code I muttered ‘stupid, stupid, stupid’ while slapping my forehead and then grubbed through Recycling, Landfill and Compost to pull my receipt back out. And then I handed the receipt to Xi Jinping but because a food stain made the code illegible he had to go ask a barista for the code anyway and when he came back I ignored his I’m-with-her-I’m-not-cutting-in-line looks so he had to go the whole way to the back of the line and wait all over again to get to the bathroom. I sort of think I could still get with Xi Jinping then, if I really gave whatever came next everything I had.
Whom do you consider to be the most overrated dead person?
The “first human,” Lucy.
To be honest, I never understood that story. We’re talking about world-renowned scientists here. Among the finest minds of their generation. Surely they, of all people, appreciate how dubbing the oldest human remains they’ve found the remains of the oldest human is a mistake that extends beyond syntax. And how giving that human a name like ‘Lucy’ is only a footpath towards further obfuscation. But because these are the bones they happen to have found, we’re all just fine with handing over “first human”? I don’t know. They’re scientists, not dogs. It always felt a little like adults talking about Santa to me, ‘Santa Santa Santa’ all December long even when there are no kids around, because they get such a big bang out of being all grown-up and in-on-the-joke. “And today, kids, we’ll be learning about Lucy, the first human!” It’s condescending as hell, is what it is. I’ll tell you who was more first than Lucy: Lucy’s mom. Lucy’s dad. Lucy’s grandma and grandpa on both sides. But the scientists don’t want you to think about that. And I guess the rest of us are too chicken to put a stop to their sick little fantasy.
Please put a selfie here:
Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.
What is your favorite outfit worn by any character in The Devil Wears Prada?
Andy’s “You want me to… Emily would die, her whole life is about Paris” little newsboy cap of betrayal. I need to flesh out this idea a little more, but somehow I am tempted to claim that the entirety of that movie’s cultural life resides in that beret.
The cap that Andy is wearing. (Fair to say that the cap is in fact wearing Andy?)
What do you consider the secret to your success?
The summer after I turned seventeen, just before I left home to go to university, my father gave me two pieces of advice: first, to remember that life was a marathon, not a sprint, and second, to keep my self-concept just as distinct from high praise as from high reproof. He wrote this advice down in a long handwritten letter, where at first the ink kept smudging but halfway through he noticed it and switched pens. My father folded the letter into a small coral envelope and put the envelope in my suitcase.
Anyway, I didn’t listen to the first piece of advice and burned out in my first semester after going 48 hours without sleep during finals. I also didn’t listen to the second piece of advice and got broken-hearted over every single one of my failures and rejections. (Which were endless at that school. It was the sort of place where you had to apply to be let into the bathroom.) I also lost my dad’s letter one time when I went to the pool to try to try to feel better, and my bag was stolen from the changing room because apparently I also didn’t know how to properly close a locker.
So I guess what I learned from this experience is that the secret to success of any kind is to not beat yourself up too much about those times when you squander precious advice, handwritten with two different pens, and lose precious objects, enfolded in both a coral envelope and a suitcase pocket, in a way that’s not even interesting. Don’t be Jesus, walking up to your cross a hundred times over, neck-bent and repenting. Get highlights and move on.
When have you been or felt the most FAMOUS in your life?
At Harvard in 2022 I got to finally live out my Elle Woods dreams by delivering the class speech on graduation day. Cracked a joke about how sexy Boston mayor Michelle Wu’s hair looked that morning, cracked a slightly more risqué joke about all that money Jeffrey Epstein had donated to the school. Managed to place the phrase “courage of conviction.” Felt like a badass, was stopped on the street all day by fellow students, and one of my peers noted on this anonymous forum we were all using at the time, Sidechat, that he and his roommate wanted to London Bridge me in the Science Center bathroom. I believe this counts as an accolade, even if LinkedIn customer support disagrees.
What is your current Lock Screen?
The Beirut skyline during sunset. In my picture, the sun is an otherworldly white bulb spilling red over into the buildings. That sight somehow evokes freedom, claustrophobia, hope, despair, permanence and fragility all at once for me. In Lebanon so much time is spent in the car, listening to music in that peculiar space of reflection where mechanical time is suspended, and so when the sun descends so intently over Beirut while you yourself drive towards the city, it almost feels like the sky is telling you personally: “yes, this is all real, this strange past is yours, too.”
After the August 4th 2020 blast and subsequent economic collapse, as Lebanon slowly disappeared from international news, I remember having a sudden realization: that it was one country among many, and not everybody else came from it. Somehow this had never occurred to me before. I felt not only hurt, but perhaps even more strangely, confused. Lebanon, then, had all along been a part of my life, not a total and universal event? But in fact this observation explained a lot. So much of my childhood in Paris had been spent trying to excavate my parents’ from the confusing tangle of history. Trying to map the dazed images I’d collected—the gunning down of my mother’s Palestinian neighbor, white blouse stippled suddenly with shots of red; the burning down my grandfather’s antiquities shop, golden figurines molten by the shore—to a material timeline of history. But even as I learned the facts of the Lebanese civil war these images remained–as I’m sure they are for you too, reading this now–essentially senseless. The only input that could give them any intelligible shape were my parents’ other stories, their second register for talking about Lebanon. How all the kids referred to Franz Kafka as “France Kafta” at school. And how while learning about Galileo a teacher reproached a student for chewing gum, and when the student denied there was anything in his mouth the teacher muttered, to himself, “And yet it moves...” And how my mother’s friend (now brother-in-law) peed in the punch at one party while the bombs hailed on outside, and how my father’s best friend drove a janky motorcycle they’d nicknamed “Miserati” through the dark curfew nights. I think that a certain theory or outlook on life, the first of many I would begin to sketch as a child, emerged in me from this juxtaposition: that most often the thing that keeps you from wanting to opt out of existing altogether is not any profound breakthrough into other people’s souls, but rather the France Kaftas and the Miseratis of the world, parties where your friend pees in the punch, and maybe a sunset or two, watched from the car. So that’s sort of the feeling my lock screen evokes for me when I look at it now from what feels (to me) like a contingent or at least accidental life, so very different and so very far from the place I grew up imagining to be always more intense, more real, and more mine than here.
The Beirut skyline at sunset.
What is your most deeply held but illogical belief?
That after a long streak of heads, my coin is ‘due’ to land on tails (and after a long streak of tails, on heads.)
What is your most irrational fear or anxiety?
For a long time, it was that scaffolding would collapse onto me. Then one day, scaffolding fucking collapsed onto me. I swear to God. It was during one of those freezing, stormy Boston days that made you understand polytheism, and like always as I passed my dorm’s scaffolding I looked up to make sure no bolt or screw was looking a little loose. Except this time, one was loose. There was a sudden gust of wind, and then there was a glacial metallic sound, steel sliding on steel, and before I knew it I was sprinting for my life as a wooden plank three times my height came plummeting from the sky and ultimately crashed down behind me. The strangest thing about this episode was that I went straight from my near-death experience to a class about coding boxplots on R where the professor kept saying, the points beyond the whiskers are outliers, the points beyond the whiskers are outliers, as if I hadn’t almost just died. There was a red line and a green line on one of her PowerPoint graphs to symbolize the variance between different statistical models, and this was supposed to be interesting even though my death plank was still right there on the sidewalk two streets down. And then the second strangest thing about this moment was the lesson it had so clearly descended upon me in plank form: Listen to your anxiety. Hear your paranoia out. These people do think you’re a dumbass. You are saying inanities, and you will be losing the little goodwill you’ve been able to amass thus far if you don’t look up at the sky and clock the gigantic rectangle of death barreling right towards your face.
What is the coolest object in your apartment/house/domicile?
My great-great-grandfather’s book Histoire de Baalbek, a chronicle of Baalbek’s legendary Roman ruins, of which he was the first conservator. The one I have here is the Histoire’s fifth edition, the result of forty years spent studying the ruins’ every last mystery. I came upon it in 2023, the summer my aunt died, while we were boxing up her things.
That summer was the hottest I’d ever lived in Lebanon. Through the car window the sun flashed white patches of texture on my father’s funeral suit collar; I fidgeted on sticky leather in the back seat, feeling lonely, airless, late. At hikes and lunches I kept spacing out on people, wondering where I could go that did not feel like this. And so, amid those distant Roman outlines and black serif letters, I began to see the escape hatch I’d looked for all summer. My great-great-grandfather spent much of the book's 168 pages burrowing for evidence for his theory that Mercury was secretly part of the triad of gods worshipped in Baalbek alongside Jupiter and Venus, a quest he liberally adjourned to marvel along the porticoes at "what man can do, when he is aided by genius!”, and gradually it was this image, of a wide-eyed eccentric wandering around the quarry, turning over stones, that superposed itself over the bare walls of my aunt’s room. To this day, my favorite part of Histoire de Baalbek is the introduction’s last sentence, in which my great-great-grandfather apologizes, in better French than I could ever muster or translate, for his difficulties “writing in a language which, as dear to us as it may be, remains nevertheless foreign.” I love that line’s subtext and reserve, and not just because it offers a living document of one man’s place in history, his particular spot within that ever layered French-Lebanese relationship, but also because it tells me something about my great-great-grandfather’s personality. It’s always kind of exhilarating to fall upon reminders that people from the past had personalities. Sometimes historical details like the fact that the Battle of Hastings was at 9am on a Saturday make it really difficult to imagine that they did.
Histoire de Baalbek, 1928 edition.
Please recommend a product. Any product.
This little cat with sunglasses and a fishing rod that you can perch up on your shelf. If you live in New York you can find him here, on 1st and 9th. What I love about him is that his fishing rod is detachable, so sometimes I give him one of my earrings to hold instead of a tiny fish and then immediately he goes from cool-jazzy-laidback-cat who fishes on Sundays to creepy-stalker-fetish-cat who steals dirty panties and laughs like a hyena when he puts his cat girlfriend through yet another pussy joke. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is a very versatile product.
Cool-jazzy-laidback-cat.
What do you think Taylor Swift is doing AT THIS VERY SECOND?
Reading this interview, probably. Taylor: It's not you. Hi. You’re not the problem, it’s not you.
What did your childhood smell like?
My childhood had such a nice smell. It was a warm, inviting, we’re-all-waiting-for-you smell that, like all important things, I am hesitant to try to describe for fear of flattening all of its particular lights and memories into a limp pile of words. The best way I can put it is that our home in Paris always smelled like it was pouring rain outside, even if it wasn’t, and you were in the only nice, cosy, safe place left in the world. The smell wasn’t a process, but it also wasn’t a flower. It began as soon as you entered the apartment, and was somehow the negation of the rest of the building’s odor, which was airless and kitchen-like, and so this gave me the strange sensation that my family was a small cocoon both opposite and immune to the rest of the world.
(This impression may also have been solidified by the fact that our direct neighbor’s first and only question to my mother when we moved in was “But are you Muslim?”, and that our only other interaction with her that year was when I got put in a wheelchair for four months following an accident and she rang the doorbell to insist I “wheel more silently.”)
How did you meet your best friend?
I know there must have been some kind of a courtship ritual beforehand, the way there always is between kids, but the scene that stands out in my memory has us stopping to dig for a rare fossil in the park by the Cardinal Amette church while the rest of our grade continued advancing in pairs towards the kiosk. As it turned out, the object we’d noticed sticking out of the sand was not a rare fossil but a discarded oyster shell, and our teacher made us chuck it back onto the ground with a deeply disgusted look when she discovered us. But we came back for it later. We knew we had found something special even if nobody else understood. In a way, we did things upside down, because first we found the treasure, and only much later did we find the map: two years ago, at which point my best friend and I had been best friends for about twenty years, our parents learned from a tourist map of Damascus that her great-great-grandparents and mine had been neighbors there in the late 1800s; and that, two generations later, our grandmothers had been neighbors in Beirut’s Jewish quarter too.
Who or what gives you the ick?
The word ‘crusty.’ It’s a really icky word, no matter which way you look at it. Food shouldn’t be ‘crusty’; a person shouldn’t be ‘crusty’; a place shouldn’t be ‘crusty’. Even the word ‘crusty’ has no business being this crusty.
Who or what makes you cringe?
Those Mid-Atlantic accents from really old movies.
Men (Greeks and etymologists excluded) who use the words ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ in earnest.
Brands that drop lowercase one-liners on any TikTok that so much as breathes in their general direction.
What fictional universe would you choose to live in forever?
The wizarding world. That’s all. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you a book.
What is a trend you hope comes back?
Collecting and trading Diddl sheets needs to come back. I know, Peter Pan syndrome. But one of my best friends got me some really rare sheets for my 25th birthday this year, multicolored and scented, and honest to God I felt all of the old feelings—the anticipation, the sanctification, even the slight fear that someone would steal my Diddl sheets even though we were literally on our way out to the club and certainly no one had any plastic sleeves on them. Collecting these sheets as kids was the breath of the angels on our skin and a sip from the chalice of the gods but it was even more than that: it gave us something to do. What do we have to do now? If the new Diddl is not Diddl himself but some other anthropomorphic animal I can live with that, but at the very least he should be from the rodent family, with a preference–it goes without saying–for gerbils and house mice.
What is a conspiracy theory you actually think is true?
Look, I’m not saying that the moon landing was staged. Nobody is saying that the moon landing was staged. But isn’t it a bit lame that it wasn’t? I’ve always thought that would make for a far better tale than going to the actual moon like some sort of sheep. Like, if this particular chapter of geopolitical history were a myth, and Russia and the US were mortals being put to the test by the gods, then the version we currently have is one where the US wins because they snag a brass ring off the carousel just a spin before Russia does. That’s not a story; there’s no hero. That’s the exposition, where a pattern gets set up so that the hero can break it later. Meanwhile, the version where the US stages the moon landing is a story with a hero—someone who outsmarts the gods, arrives at the carousel with a duplicate brass ring already hidden in their pocket and then hops on a horse and fakes the grab. All I’m saying is this: the staged moon landing is the good story. It’s the alluring story. Fuck it: it’s the American story. So why all the eye-rolling? I mean, is it just me? This is a problem I think about a lot.
Thoughts on God?
There’s only one of Him and so many of us, so I tend not to expect too much from Him personally.
How is a raven like a writing desk?
I’m still waiting for one to show up at my door. What gives, Amazon? My order number is 113-7642389-1253847.