Category: Culture
Against Humanity
You hear the term “crimes against humanity” and imagine a whole movie reel of the most horrible atrocities ever committed by human hands. You draw up images of naked, starving, rail-thin children screaming in concentration...
Social politics according to Facebook’s new emojis—we’re pretty much doomed
The talk in the series of tubes this week buzzed over the new reaction emojis available on everyone’s favorite social media site—the Book of Face. Whereas for most of the last decade, friends, friends of friends,...
Unexplainable
Newtown, Aurora, Charleston, San Bernardino, Fort Hood—now, Kalamazoo. It’s surreal to think that next time the president or a pastor laments forlornly over the not-so-little list of American gun tragedies, my hometown could be there. A...
How to make 2016 a better year for Syria
The city of Qamishli in northeastern Syria closed out 2015 with explosions. They weren’t fireworks. They were the blasts of a car bomb outside a popular café. Thirteen people were killed, mostly young men and...
Syria in summary – January 2016
An estimated one million refugees crossed the Mediterranean to Europe in 2015, but the brief open-door sentiment captained by a German government newly-alert to the severity of the refugee crisis at its doorstep is already beginning...
Stay in the Middle East loop. Read these.
1. ‘I wish I could die’: Meeting the man who helped trigger the Arab Spring – Clemens Höges, Spiegel Online International, Jan. 21 “The acts of desperation quickly transformed into a political hurricane. It swept along Africa’s...
Fun with Arabic. Also Known As, Eating Pigeons and Drinking Sweat
To begin, here’s the story of a false cognate called lamoon. In Egyptian Arabic, lamoon means what you’d think it means: lemon. But in Lebanese Arabic, the sort I’ll (attempt to) speak for the next...
‘We are limited, but by God we are unlimited.’
“The Church has always done charity work and must continue to do it,” said one of our hosts at the largest Orthodox compound in Cairo. “This bishopric, however, focuses its efforts specifically on the work...
Dust to dust
It’s the peculiar rules of hectic Cairo traffic, the ones seemingly unknowable to anyone not born within earshot of the horns and shouts and screeching brakes. It’s the way the city flats seem one with...
I won’t be far
The way to do anything is to just do it; the way to get anywhere is to start moving your feet; and the way to change your life, and hopefully the lives of others, is...