Place of Rest
I walk to the Mt. Auburn cemetery often to visit our plot, finding new and old friends among the dead.
I Bite My Tongue
I’d like to tell my 8 year old daughter that for some children, schools are their only protection.
The Same Thing, Only Different
We are perfectly free to think as long as we keep our thoughts to ourselves . . . and make sure they cannot escape.
The History Nigeria is Fighting to Erase
I belong to the generation unable to study an expurgated history of Nigeria.
Susan Sontag: Out and In
Sontag wasn't drawn to write about AIDS because she was (sometimes) homosexual, but because she had been thinking about the ways disease, including her own, is talked about.
Homo Oblivious
Yesterday’s “Soviet Man” has morphed into today’s “Amnesiac Man”. Homo Sovieticus has mutated into Homo Oblivious.
Grow Old and Be Strong
I watched my 85-year-old wife, hunched over her red three-wheel walker as she pushed towards the line of twenty Military Police dressed in full riot gear.
Aristo and the Friendly Forest Squirrels
Once again, we are dragged into a race between man vs. machine.
New Year’s Letter to Oksana Zabuzhko
What can we, as writers, offer a world appearing to invite another universal catastrophe, this time on an unprecedented scale?
Covering the Head to Save the Head
She had become a liability for all groups: those for whom she was too Muslim and for those to whom she was not Muslim enough.
What is a Homeland?
What I try to convince myself of is that this is temporary, and one day the hope of peace will shine on every roofless house in my country.
Folkcal Fraim 1
But where do faces come from — the places before us, the places before ageless poetry and un-aimed photography or have they not come yet?
Rembrandt Redux
18 months, 500 hours, 148 million pixels and 186,000 data points. “All that work, for this?”
Why I Became an Iranian Writer
This is how my flesh came to understand the value of a single word…
Running in Place
Was Progress, the ambition of a society to, well, improve itself, only a brief historical phenomenon that has faded like the Cheshire Cat, leaving us only a jaundiced grin (or a yellow vest)?…
Hatred of the Written Word
Hatred of the written word has taken hold of state institutions— institutions of security and of executive power…
Target Practice (Part 2)
How the people we came to help (the Afghans) could benefit from our being in Zombalay proved utterly elusive…