In March of last year, Diana Matar joined her husband, Hisham, when he returned to his homeland of Libya. This was Hisham’s first time in Libya since his family left, in 1979, when he was eight years old, and he writes about the trip in his piece in the magazine this week. “What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?” he asks at the beginning of the article.

“Libya was the place Hisham had to leave as a boy,” writes Diana, “it was the country that had kidnapped his father and incarcerated many family members. Personally and viscerally, it was a place that inspired fear in me, renewed every time Hisham wrote about his past or criticized the dictatorship.” Diana had never been to Libya, and in the course of the four weeks they spent together there, Diana “met Hisham’s extended family, saw the landscape he grew up in, and dipped my toes in the sea he loved as a boy. I was moved the country’s natural beauty and the tenderness and vibrancy of its people.”

—Elissa Curtis. Here is a selection of Diana’s photographs of the journey: http://nyr.kr/10C5pug

Yesterday’s killings in Libya are a tragic reminder of just how interminable revolution can be. It’s hard not to see the murder of J. Christopher Stevens and his colleagues as connected to the events of five, six, and even seven decades ago. Libya’s path to independence began in 1949; then, as now, outside forces and warring factions within Libya kept the country veering between hope and despair, celebration and mourning. Stevens, a former Peace Corps volunteer famous for his ready smile, was an optimist, as you’d have to be in his line of work, and his good nature feels especially significant when you look over The New Yorker’s archived reporting from Libya…

Joshua Rothman looks into the New Yorker’s archives at Westerners in Libya, Then and Now: http://nyr.kr/SILWtM

Photograph by Thomas Dworzak.

Obama’s subsequent jibe that Romney “shoots first and aims later” hit home. But perhaps the most disturbing thing about this whole incident is that it wasn’t simply a spontaneous gaffe on the part of the G.O.P. candidate. It was debated and thought through. According to the same report in today’s Washington Post, Romney acted on the “unanimous recommendation of his foreign policy and political advisers.”

Think about that for a moment….

- John Cassidy, Continue Reading: http://nyr.kr/O260Wj

Hisham Matar on the attack in Benghazi and the ultra-religious groups on Libya’s extreme right: http://nyr.kr/Q5f2xH

John Cassidy breaks down the order of events in Cairo, Libya, and the U.S. over the past 24 hours, and considers how they might affect the Romney and Obama’s campaigns: http://nyr.kr/OHoY02

There will be plenty of time to discuss the rights and wrongs. But before getting into all that, I thought it might be worth setting down how the past twenty-four hours unfolded. With events taking place in three countries, on two continents, there has been a lot of confusion about who said what when. Here’s a quick timeline I put together from the Web. As far as I can see, Romney doesn’t come out of it looking any better….

Polarizing Attacks, at Home and Abroad - Jon Lee Anderson on the attacks in Benghazi and Cairo: http://nyr.kr/QRslkt

These new attacks on diplomatic outposts highlight the continuing uncertainties of the region’s evolving relationship with the United States, a result of the volatile forces unleashed in the so-called Arab Spring that began early last year. In the continuing tug of war by competing groups, not all of them friendly to the U.S., over political power, there may well be more unwelcome surprises to come…

Photograph by STR/AFP/Getty Images.

Qaddafi Postage Stamps

This week in the magazine, Jon Lee Anderson reports on the strange and destructive world created by Muammar Qaddafi during his reign as President of Libya. Anderson writes that, in the days following Qaddafi’s death, “rebels dramatized their triumph by removing the visible symbols of Qaddafi’s power wherever they found them.” Libyan postage stamps, like the ones in the photoset above, are among the symbols left over.

Click through to see more of the stamps: http://nyr.kr/rtjADu

King of Kings; The last days of Muammar Qaddafi

In this week’s issue, Jon Lee Anderson takes a definitive look at Libya, its past under Qaddafi, and the nation’s future: http://nyr.kr/vVTgcl

Our Libya Coverage, in Images

Libya in pictures, with our coverage of the crisis there, including Jon Lee Anderson’s dispatches.