A Lebanese Edition of Culture Cards? Help us make it.

A Lebanese gathering has a specific energy that diaspora members recognize instantly: the meze table that keeps expanding, the political argument that erupts without warning and is somehow resolved before dessert, the grandmother who has opinions about every single thing anyone does and is also the most beloved person in the room. Lebanese culture holds enormous warmth, extraordinary food, a fierce sense of regional and sectarian identity, and a collective pride that has survived considerable historical pressure. A Lebanese Edition of Culture Cards would try to hold all of that without flattening any of it.

The Lebanese diaspora is one of the most far-flung in the world — from São Paulo to Dakar to Detroit to Sydney — and it carries a shared culture that is louder and more vivid than its country's small geography might suggest. The music, the dancing at weddings that goes until genuinely unreasonable hours, the specific competitiveness about whose city makes better food, the saints' day festivals that are also neighborhood social events — there's a game here. Sign up and help us make it.