I was in New York City for hours yesterday, including a couple media events, and I can tell you there is only one conversation in New York, what will happen to the New York Times? What is the future of…
As an American Jew, I was taught to go all gooey-eyed at the thought of Israel… –David Brooks in a column on his twelfth trip to the Holy Land where he says that the Palestinians are the obstacle to peace…
The pseudonymous “Seven” regularly sends me news tips from California, so I asked her what’s on her mind, and she sent along the following note. Seven is a Palestinian-American woman who does not want her real name used lest she…
Smart piece by Antony Loewenstein down under saying that the mainstream media are going away not just because of a technological change but because they’re invested more in the establishment hierarchy than in information. I.e., they’ve blown the story. Or…
Anees writes from Jerusalem (where alas, he is a second-class citizen): I usually avoid reading Thomas Friedman, but I was intrigued by the title, “In the Age of Pirates”. He does not specifically say it, but what he writes can…
From Michael Massing’s guardedly-positive review of Tom Ricks’s new book, The Gamble, in the New York Review of Book– the full text of which is not on-line: It’s striking to see the extent to which Ricks, in assessing the work…
This mock-realist piece by David Samuels on Slate arguing for an Israeli strike on Iran is outlandish in a number of ways. Most outlandish: Samuels’s assessment that it is a “fiction” that there would be a “mass public outcry” in…
I went to dinner last night at a good friend’s, and there were beautiful Easter foods. I was the only Jew there, but didn’t think about that till today. There were some Europeans, and a Muslim. A sense of American…
Nice piece in the Times (or the IHT, I can’t tell the difference) by Sigridur Vidis Jonsdottir on an Baghdad refugees in tents in the Iraqi desert near the Syrian border. They’re unwelcome in Baghdad because they’re Palestinian: Lina was…