In A Well-Ordered Society
The campus security guards who stopped me for running without a shirt were very nice about it. When one of them shouted unfamiliar words from their patrol car, I was at the bottom of a long hill and...
View ArticleMike Huckabee, Pope Francis, and the Rise of Mother Manners
It seems a terrible waste in a man whose name is basically a dirty limerick waiting to be written, but Mike Huckabee frowns on cussing. On an Iowa radio program, after assuring listeners that “In the...
View ArticleLent and the Lame Evangelist
I’ve been warned that wearing a cross openly in Turkey means asking for trouble. There’s good reason for thinking so. The Republic was conceived in war – the War of Independence, in which several...
View ArticleMonday Mourning Coming Down
The day after IS terrorists beheaded 21 Coptic Christians on a Libyan beach, all of Turkey wore black – in memory of Ozgecan Aslan, a university student who was murdered, allegedly after frustrating a...
View ArticleRamadan at the Mall
They say Ramadan opens with a rolling worldwide cannonade: each locality keeps its own cannon, which its top dignitary fires off, ushering in the holy month with a bang. If the Turkish city of Bursa...
View ArticleISIS Gains A New Enemy: My Former Student
If you wait long enough on a balcony overlooking the main street of a Turkish village, you might see a convoy of cars filled with exuberant young men honking their horns and shouting. Some will be...
View ArticleFor Rosh Hashanah: The Jewish Earworm
Being Jewish isn’t always a picnic. I got my first inkling of this when I was about nine. My father and I were walking near his house in Westfield, New Jersey, when he fell into conversation with a...
View ArticleRefugees and Bart Simpson’s Paradox
In the summer of 2002, Brent Scowcroft published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal under the self-explanatory title “Don’t Attack Saddam.” His analysis was as incisive and free from partisan...
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