I like to tell my students that I wouldn't have moved to Turkey if Orhan Pamuk hadn't made me admire it from afar. I say this partly because it's true, but mostly because it shocks them, and that seems useful for my purposes. Their mouths drop open in disbelief, and they sit slackjawed while I tell them how The Black Book sold me on their city. With misty pictures of decaying opulence and narrow alleyways dotted with minarets, it made the word Bosporus name a strait that I needed to see. The scruffy, Diesel-clad Turks that I teach throw up their hands. Their ongoing perplexity at my decision to leave a good job in the US to teach at their Turkish university grows into something more. How could a novel by Orhan Pamuk make me think this was a good idea? Read More

"Right now, terrorists are trying to kill me.
My wife and family are faraway,
and the people I work with are idiots.
My name is SFC John H.
I am a US Soldier.
This has been the longest year of my life."
—from the blog John of Arabia

Never have soldiers in a war been equipped with so much personal technology. It's not just backpack missiles. "You literally can't go 30 seconds without hearing a Kylie Minogue tune or Beethoven's Symphony in C Minor emanating from someone's pocket," grumbled journalist Kevin Sites in his blog. Sites would later videotape a U.S. Marine killing an unarmed man in a mosque, provoking international controversy, but that day in Kuwait, still waiting to cross the border, the image that stayed with him was the glow of laptops, temporarily left alone by their users: "One by one, the ghostly images of wives, children, girlfriends, husbands, pets, slowly appear[ed] from the depths of cyberspace—as screensavers." Read More

A Palestinian state will come into existence, some say, by a "two-state solution." Some say a "one-state solution." They are not thinking big. A fifty-one state solution—that is the answer.

The United States must offer the West Bank and Gaza Strip statehood in the manner of Nevada or Rhode Island. Voting can follow conventional forms for state ratification under federal law. Alaska and Hawaii prove states need not be contiguous with the continental forty-eight. Read More