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“Je ne m’enterre pas dans un particularisme étroit. Mais je ne veux pas non plus me perdre dans un universalisme décharné. Il y a deux manières de se perdre: par…

Some years ago, I found myself sitting among distant cousins at a family reunion; at some point in the long evening I asked, apropos of nothing: “when you were a…

Emergencies make periods. Not just in what one perceives to be individual consciousness, when the subject in emergency clings to the before and after of seemingly incommensurate realties, when the…

Oh, how we long for “a day after” now!1 I am drafting this essay from the Great Indoors on the Northwest side of Chicago on the ancestral lands of the…

They can say they buried him at sea, but they cannot say they did it according to Islam. Sea burials are permissible for Muslims in extraordinary circumstances. This is not…

My father spoke English with a slight British accent, a lasting mark of the schools he attended in Kabul in the 1940s and early 1950s. He would regale us with…

In February, a group of students and I visited the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. Originally built to be used as a medium-security prison, it went unoccupied for years….

In August 2003, as the United States was ramping up the Global War on Terror, the Pentagon hosted a curious movie night for its intelligence and army personnel: Gillo Pontecorvo’s…