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Face to Face
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Ancient Scribbles
A very satisfying day at Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum. As is typical, I got so thoroghly engrossed by the relatively small collection of ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions that I hardly had energy for the vast halls of pottery and burial monuments from antique Anatolia. Even so, the splendor of the Alexander Sarcophagous from Sidon (as well as…
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Half Asleep in Istanbul
I’ve just arrived in Istanbul, Turkey to begin a little more than two weeks in the Middle East. The mission: an article on science and Islam (plus the unexpected). I’m in a hostel overlooking the Bosphorus with Michael Jackson music videos playing, one after another. It was a spectacularly beautiful day to arrive at a…
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When Soldiers Become Warriors
For some time, I’ve been hearing talk of “warriors” or “warfighters,” rather than “soldiers,” in my casual observation of the U.S. military. You hear this at all levels, from infantrymen referring to themselves, to the “warfighter standardized equipment” discussed at the highest echelons of the military-industrial mafia. At a recent talk in New York, the…
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Have Your Markets and Your Health Care Too
Last night, a dear friend of mine told me that he may have lost his health coverage through Medicaid. No warning. He got a call from the pharmacy saying the insurance didn’t go through. If this is true, he may be in real trouble. He has cystic fibrosis, and he needs about $70,000/year in medicine…
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Empathy in Action
In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been an ongoing back-and-forth over in the comments at a recent post, which have forced me to explain more fully some earlier statements about empathy as a political virtue and skepticism as an intellectual habit. Joel, who has been patient enough to draw me out on these things, has…
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The Uses of Free Culture
Tonight I had the pleasure to attend one of Fred Benenson’s Creative Commons salons at the office of my old employer in the West Village. It was a treat of ingenuity, pizza, and beer, somehow paid for by “free culture.” The idea we’re supposed to take home with us is that great things can be…
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Fame, Sainthood, Personhood, Failure
I’ll begin with a commentary on a commentary on a commentator of texts. Last night over noodles in a food court in Flushing, Queens, a friend told me about an Egyptian poet who probed the connections between commentary and silence. In the September 29 New Yorker, Louis Menand has a piece on the literary critic…
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Times of Need
Tonight, quoth the president:”This is an extraordinary period for America’s economy.” Which you might think sounds good, until: We’ve seen triple-digit swings in the stock market. Major financial institutions have teetered on the edge of collapse, and some have failed. As uncertainty has grown, many banks have restricted lending, credit markets have frozen, and families…