When we first encounter Rushdie's all-powerful medieval ruler from the East, Akbar the Great, we think of Italo Calvino and Invisible Cities. Once we're introduced to his imaginary queen Jodha, who dreams of Akbar while waiting for him in an imperial capital that hovers "between sanity and delirium, between what was fanciful and what was real," we're reminded of Jorge Luis Borges and his story, "The Circular Ruins." But as Akbar's fantasy solidifies around his brutal victory over the Rana, and his real queens' mounting jealousy of the imaginary one; as we see the point of the pencil with which he etches the lines of Jodha's face, and the point with which Jodha etches his, as her honed fingernails carve runes across his chest, lips, and testicles; as Read More

Michael Clayton

There was a lot of driving in Michael Clayton. I like driving in movies but after a while Michael Clayton started to seem like a car ad—though it showed how a car ad can be liberal. That's a message for our times. Read More

For seven years, our lame-duck President has rejected the idea that mere civilians—historians, armchair experts, American voters—have any right to criticize his foreign policy maneuvers. Not only is he the "decider," but his decisions are based on criteria conveniently beyond our scrutiny, and thus unavailable for second-guessing. We may study the news reports and policy papers he doesn't read, we may scrutinize the leaked and perhaps faulty CIA intelligence he ignores—but we can't do the one thing that, according to President Bush, really matters: we can't look foreign leaders in the eye. 

Some time ago I came across a skinny little book bearing the title With Borges. It is the recollection of a brief stint in a young man's life spent reading to the Argentine giant of letters, Jorge Luis Borges. Much in the book was familiar—Borges lived with his mother into his sixties, he devoured books with a fiendish voracity, his blindness in old age necessitated that others read aloud to him—but one tiny passage, an aside, was new and striking to me: in it, the memoirist notes that though the great cosmopolitan boasted a taste for everything under the sun, from ancient Nordic folk verse to kabbalistic number games to cheap Westerns and detective stories, Borges nonetheless remarked that there was absolutely nothing he could find of universal importance in American Negro culture. It was simply too provincial. And because, as he saw it, Negroes had failed to produce a "universal culture"—like that of the ancient Greeks, the English, the Arabs, the Chinese, the Jews—because they could offer nothing of equal worth to the rest of the world, they were therefore in a sense inferior. This was Borges's view and it is something that I have come to think about often. Read More

[Click here to read the article in English.]

Si te llamaras como el mayor genocida de la historia, ¿defenderías tu derecho a llevar ese nombre?

(Photo credit: Eilon Paz)

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Hitler vive en Uruguay. Sí. En esta república oriental de Sudamérica viven Hitler Aguirre y Hitler da Silva. Viven Hitler Pereira y Hitler Edén Ganoso. Vive hasta un Hitler de los Santos. Y aunque en la guía telefónica del país sólo aparecen seis ciudadanos llamados así, es difícil saber cuántos otros tienen teléfono o cuántos prefieren figurar con nombres distintos para evitar que los califiquen o que se burlen de ellos. Llamarse como se apellidó el mayor genocida del siglo XX, o sea Hitles, ¿no es acaso una razón para vivir avergonzado? Read More

[Click here to read the article in Spanish.]

If you were named after the perpetrator of the worst genocide in history, would you defend the right to your name?

(Photo credit: Eilon Paz)

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Hitler lives in Uruguay. Yes. In this eastern republic of South America lives a Hitler Aguirre and a Hitler da Silva. There's Hitler Pereira and Hitler Edén Ganoso. There's even a Hitler de los Santos—"of the Saints." Though only six such names appear in the national phone book, it's hard to know how many other Hitlers have a phone or how many prefer to be listed under different names in order to avoid being misjudged or mocked. To be called by the surname of the perpetrator of the worst genocide of the twentieth century—that is, Hitler—wouldn't that give one cause for shame? Read More

A Letter to My Mother

Dear Mom:

I'm writing this letter at the counter of a coffee shop on 168^th Street. I'm in between interviews for an article I'm writing. It's been a good day so far, relatively. I've been able to work as a reporter, to speak to people who know interesting things, to ply my trade, such as it is. Today, at least, I'm not forced to do the menial work I often do in order to sustain myself financially—and, by extension, to sustain your new grandchild: my daughter.