I don't know what's going to happen to Gezi Park, to Istanbul, to Turkey, and I don't know where I'll be when whatever happens does, but it would be a shame to know that I lived in Istanbul for the protests in 2013 but missed out on revolution-köfte. [Continue]
There is no ideal world for a person that pre-exists one's participation in creating it. But here’s what Ralph and I can do: hurl our fumbling selves against the world. Smash it up real good. [Continue]
Wander too far down the path of rationalist dogma and it’ll be no surprise if you end up like Richard Dawkins, sunning his genitals in a world that no longer makes any sense. [Continue]
If the Grateful Dead will always be stuck somewhere between band and cult, Epicureanism itself has been stuck between cult and philosophy since it was founded around 300 BCE. [Continue]
Four books attempt to describe the Detroit of past and present: two good, one bad, one of such inconsequence its inclusion here is only justified as an act of collation. [Continue]
Anderson’s movies promote a particular fallacy: they encourage us to accept the symbol for the reality. [Continue]
TAXI isn’t a collection of short stories, or a novel, or a piece of journalism, it is a maqama, an old style of Arabic literature. Each chapter is one facet of the greater picture: the street in Cairo in that particular moment. [Continue]
Detropia registers a mood of attenuated uncertainty, the precarious present understood not as a single melodramatic catastrophe but as “a thick moment of ongoingness.” [Continue]
