Now it’s my turn to write a letter while watching the snow fall from my bedroom window. The rest of the house — unheated, uninsulated concrete — is as cold as a a meat locker, but I’ve got a kerosene burner going, and and maybe another hour of town electricity before I have to go […]
I arrived yesterday in Kurdistan by road from Diyabakir, the largest city in Kurdish eastern Turkey, a dusty place full of wheelbarrow boys, housing ghettos, trash fires, and amazingly, a UPS office where I sent my expense receipts back to New York. I left at four in the morning with a driver who admitted that […]
Friends,
So there I was, on the 11th day of what was supposed to be no more than a two-day Time magazine assignment in Amman, a loose collection of dry hills and sprawling white houses and highways that is as close to suburban southern California as you can get in the Middle East — Orange […]
Dear Friends,
I’ve gotten many a worried e-mail lately, so I just wanted to let you know that I am alive and well and planning to vote for John Kerry.
That’s all the good news I have to report. For the past three days, I’ve basically been stuck in the fortified hotel complex made up of the […]
How’s this for a bad idea?
Try smuggling a cigarette lighter shaped as an exact replica of a 9mm
Beretta automatic pistol through the checked luggage X-ray at Queen Alia
International Airport in Amman, Jordan.
When that set off all kinds of buzzers, the Jordanian secret police looking
through my dirty underwear also found the uniform of a Field Marshall […]
Friends and Family,
I’m ok, I just got a very effective wake up call.
Sorry I didn’t e-mail sooner. I figured everyone would be asleep in NY and just waking up in Beirut. But my brother sent a worried e-mail, and I’m betting that many of you are also insomniacs or newshounds or both.
The […]
Dear Friends,
I’m sorry it has taken so long for me to send news about my life and movements in the Middle East. For several months I was brought to the edge of sanity through Arabic instruction. Arabic. Turns out, not an easy language. Who knew? I still can hardly string a sentence together.
Though my […]