KtBlog
Dear Cruelest Month: Spring Isn’t Arab
Once upon a time we lay in bed trying to imagine what shelling sounded like. We being me and the man I loved. Ah, those early days of my Orientalism…
Egypt For Everybody
Immediately following the Egyptian revolution, my friend Greg Berger, a filmmaker, and journalist Al Giordano, of Narco News, went to Cairo to make a series of short videos with the…
Head-Hunting
An excerpt from Rag and Bone, in which a soccer-playing Syrian calls Bashar al-Assad a lizard.
Martyrdom Makeover
New from me at Religion Dispatches: The idea of martyrdom hasn’t been in very good shape lately. One common usage of it—“I’ll not be made a martyr!”—refers to the prospect…
Solidarity
More rallies in New York City showing solidarity with the people facing upheaval and violence in the Middle East. Shameel Arafin, the photographer we introduced you to last week, was…
Killing the Buddha in Cairo
Anthony Shadid, in The New York Times: Tens of thousands of protesters who have reimagined the very notion of citizenship in a tumultuous week of defiance proclaimed with sticks, home-made bombs…
Cairo: Water Cannons and Wikileaks
My Egyptian dad called, late one night from our home in Alabama, with an urgent question: “What is Twitter?” It was all over the breaking news: the mass protests that…
My Mecca Is Taller than Yours
Check out these crazy photos of the Mecca Clock Royal Tower now under construction. Upon completion, this tower will be the second tallest building in the world, at around 1,900…
Revelation Road
After ditching the tour group, he’s got twenty-four hours and seven very important Turkish towns to see.
Travel in the Holy Land a No Go
According to the US State Department’s travel warning for Israel, West Bank and Gaza travelers to the Holy Land can be greet not with signs of peace but further travel…
Unspun
I join Chris Hedges and General Brent Scowcroft as a talking head for Al Jazeera’s new documentary news program, Faultlines, about religion in the military. I was invited to be…
