By James North “Orientalism” is much more than just prejudice against Arabs and Muslims. Edward Said, who did more than anyone to explore the ideology, explained that Orientalism can include a genuine interest in the languages and (ancient) history of…
James North writes: I remember Mahmood Mamdani from 35 years ago, when he was the most dynamic leader of the newly-organized union of graduate students at Harvard. Today he is a distinguished professor at Columbia, one of our most original…
A fine piece on Slate by Andres Martinez about the unsavory company the Times is giving itself by taking Mexican mogul Carlos Slim Helu’s $250 million. Key excerpt: the scale of Slim’s fortune, and the extent to which it was…
A friend writes: You may already know but it isn’t widely known that Dennis Ross was brought into government by Paul Wolfowitz, when PW was deputy assistant secretary of defense for regional programs under Harold Brown at the Pentagon in…
And this was on Huffpo– Absolutely stunning piece in the Independent, by Fares Akram, who, huddled with his pregnant wife and family in Gaza city, and decided not to be on his 48-year-old father’s farm, the closest farm to the…
Eric Konigsberg has a piece on the front page of the Times today about Walter Noel, a big loser in the Madoff tank. Noel lives in Connecticut and is club friends with a John J. McCloy, whose name resonates, and…
James North points me to this photograph at the top of the front page of the Times today, from Hebron, and says: “I insist that this is unconscious bias. Why is this on the front page? You would have sympathy…
Yesterday my friend James North said that the recession/depression/hogwart whatever you want to call it has already been good for us. He had to run; he was going to explain to me today. Last night I saw a friend for…
Last night I was thinking about the Obama revolution, and how it’s going to work out. All societies face revolutionary fervors; and in a democratic society we deal with them the way we just did: we bring in a total…