However, Roy said that many of the suspects had been trained to resist interrogation and only the use of truth serum helped tie loose ends together. My mom used to say that the local malang only spoke truth ["touched by God"] – it took a while for me to realize that he had touched a [...]
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Happy 8th birthday, Google. You have changed everything. Remember. Don’t. Be. Evil.
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It wasn’t enough that the Pope had to go all medieval on Muhammad but now we get news that Hans Neuenfels at the Deutsche Oper Berlin decided that what Mozart’s Idomeneo really lacked was a decapitated head of Muhammad. And Jesus and Buddha. And Poseidon. I mean, seriously, how tripe is that? Freakin’ Dante pulled [...]
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In an amazing display of cultural hipness, The General will be appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart tonight. As Stewart quipped last night, ‘I have no idea why’. Ostensibly, The General is out promoting his memoirs, In the Line of Fire [currently # 3 on amazon! {check out the non-partisan reviews (also, when [...]
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The health of leaders is at no time more important than when there’s a war on. Nations, ethnic communities and loosely affiliated gangs of rag-tag warriors depend upon the physical and psychological well-being of their chiefs for morale and direction. Several players in the War on Terror have been in the news lately for health [...]
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Today’s NYT Magazine cover story by Michael Lewis, The Ballad of Big Mike, relates a rags-on-the-way-to-riches tale about a young football player at Ole Miss. Only the most compulsive Sunday NYT readers will have actually made their way through this dull yet strangely disturbing tale of an inner-city lad weighing 334 lbs. (which figure could [...]
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I hate my birthdays and this one provides more to hate than most recent ones. Yet, I am loving this one. Because I get to see my brother in a few hours [haven't hugged him since 2001!]. Rosh Hashanah _and_ Ramadan are here, as well [shalom and mubarak!]. So, joy to all and sundry.
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Malcolm Gladwell, they say, re-processes academic work for the NYer crowd [so, the nyer crowd never went to college? is my oft retort]. There is, though, truth to the sentiment. We, the academics, tend to produce dense, jargony, historiographically involved, footnoted and blockquoted works that are designed mostly to get us the jobs, the tenures, [...]
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I was in Cambridge to participate in a workshop on colonial knowledge. I had no idea what I was walking into, but with dacoit on my side [a complete surprise], I figured it will be ok. It was great, actually. The participants were equal parts Africanists, SAists – historians and anthropologists. It may have been [...]
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The funny bit in the new edition of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is Anderson’s usage of IC… “Aside from the advantages of brevity, IC restfully occludes a pair of words from which the vampires of banality have by now sucked almost all the blood.” [via]. Ouch. Yes, some have flogged the imagining horse to death. [...]
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What the Sovereign of the State of the Vatican City needs are some bright colors to lift his mood. I have depicted him here surrounded by a warm bath of candy pink to brighten up his outlook. Pink is a great color for Pope Benedict XVI, who is undoubtedly a summer. Usually in my portraits [...]
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Shazia Sikander wins the MacArthur Fellowship. A fine artiste of miniatures and installations, Sikander brings the grand total of desi ‘geniuses’ to ? [Atul Gawande is the other desi winner this year. Ali Akbar Khan won it in 1991 & Ayesha Jalal in 1998 {thx, dk}] Sikander came to Chicago in 1999 or 2000. Homi [...]
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As an undergraduate student of comparative religion, and a Christian, I was often infuriated by the pronouncements of my professors. One, an imminent historian of religion, refused to write the word “Christ,” and instead replaced it with the Greek letter Chi, or X. When I asked him about it, he explained that he got tired [...]
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Charles McGrath has written a part deux to his expose of term paper mills in today’s Week in Review section of the NYT. Let it be noted that Mr. McGrath has for some reason not discovered the Pakistani Crime Syndicate we unearthed after his article last week. The paper he commissioned this week, a comparison [...]
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So the week flew by and I have done no shopping. Trudged around Oxford Street looking for something. Went to a couple of Body Shops – ahem – and found nothing. Is it just me or is London a tad more crowded now [then, say 1766 when I was last here - sheesh]. My quest [...]
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On the occasion of this past Monday, I decided since everyone else was doing it, I might as well hold my own little 911 observation. It occurred to me to paint a portrait of UbL, since I’ve been working on portraiture lately (by which I mean ‘making portraits’ rather than in the academic sense of [...]
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There is something to be said for three Chicago graduates who meet in whatever part of the world and speak for four hours on matters political, literary, esoteric and…gossipy. I’d imagine any group of colleagues do the same. I’d imagine we do it far nerdier. ps. all y’all oughta have read Wilkie Collins’ Moonstone. pps. [...]
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Fiction is Truer than Fact. Attributed to E. Hemingway. Like you, few things would please me more than to soak in a hot tub with Clinton, five supermodels, an 8-ball of fine Ecuadorian flake, and a split of Dom. But let’s not kid ourselves: Clinton was a weak leader governing in a sweet spot. It’s [...]
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The NYT reported yesterday in a ‘the internet might be destroying the fabric of our society’ article that students who are desperate, dishonest or rich (or any combination) can buy made-to-order term papers on the World Wide Web for as little as $9.95. A NYT editor solicited term papers on common English lit topics from [...]
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