"There's a sort of corrupted idealism about the insanely innocent Wolfowitz plan for the Middle East, the domino theory in reverse, the spreading of democracy like a germ across the Middle East. Just invade Iraq, lop off the monster's head, and the people of Iraq will want to create a democracy. It'll be like Connecticut...

"No other major social structural distinction (certainly not that between the classes) has received such massive reinforcement as the ideological separation of the modern form of the non-modern world. International treaties and doctrines dividing the world into multinational blocs serve to dramatize the distinction between the developed nations and the lesser ones, which are not...

"It is not the story that is not getting expressed: it's what surrounds the story. The climate, the atmosphere of the street, the feeling of the people, the gossip of the town, the smell; the thousand, thousand elements of reality that are part of the event you read about in 600 words in your morning...

"Like the theologians of Hamas, the ideologues of the [Israeli] settlement movement have stripped their religion of all love but self-love; they have placed themselves at the center of God's drama on earth; and they interpret their holy scriptures to prove that their enemies are supernaturally evil and undeserving of even small mercies. And, like...

My nephew Cedar, who is now five years old and attending kindergarten in north-central Kansas, has written a new poem. Here it is: MONSTER POEM (By Cedar Van Tassel) A monster is scary, a monster is deep, a monster likes to fall asleep. When it awakes, it finds its dinner, of rabbits, bugs, and feathers....

[ Above : An empty liquor bag from Rekong Peo, India.] Today I'm proud to start a new category on this blog, entitled Relics from the road . I was inspired to create this category when I was going through my old boxes of travel souvenirs, and I found a booze bag (pictured above) left...

The essay below appears in this month's Harper's . I'll comment on it later. ANYWHERE OUT OF THIS WORLD On why all writing is travel writing By Nicholas Delbanco Travel writing is, I think, coeval with writing itself. We move and remember the place that we left; from a distance we send letters home. Those...

The following riff on the cliches of creative writing (and science fiction writing in particular) was featured in the "Readings" section of the July issue of Harper's . [Cliches] STRANGELY FAMILIAR From a list of plots and themes of stories submitted "too frequently" to Strange Horizons , an online magazine of "speculative fiction." The document...

"American leadership seems to be required even in cases -- such as Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 -- where the British and their fellow Europeans had the means to resolve the crisis unaided. The US is cruelly unsuited to play the world's policeman -- Washington's attention span is famously short, even in chronically troubled regions...

"At a superficial level much of Western culture has indeed permeated the rest of the world. At a more basic level, however, Western concepts differ fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations. Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state,...

"So one of the things that I hope to achieve with White Mughals is to present an image of how Islam is lived in this period, where Hindus and Christians are participating in Muslim ceremonies and vice-versa, with none of the

The "Readings" section of the August Harper's contains a selection of ribald children's songs from around the world. I've listed a dozen examples below, but if you're interested in learning more (or contributing the exotic off-color rhymes you learned during your travels), visit the Global Schoolyard Rhyme Project at a rather unusual website known as...

"The furious and malignant anti-Westernism of the Islamic fundamentalists is in part an expression of the Arab world's rage at itself. It is in certain respects an outpouring of Arab agony over what is regarded as cultural surrender to the West. From this standpoint, Islamic fundamentalism is a weapon with which people who feel they...

The following appeared in the "Readings" section of Harper's in June of 2004. I find it interesting (and encouraging, actually) that the Marine Corps is offering cultural sensitivity tips not unlike one might find in the front of a Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East. [Etiquette] SEMPER SENSITIVE From a handout that accompanies a...

One of the most perplexing trends in magazine journalism in recent years is the tendency to categorize service articles into definitive lists -- the "25 Best Rivers For Kayaking", for example, or "America's 10 Most Liveable Cities". The conceit of such "list journalism", of course, is that these lists are largely arbitrary -- thrown together...

"The last time infidels conquered Baghdad was in 1258, when the Mongol horde, led by Genghis Khan

It is commonly known that travelers, when thrown together overseas for extended periods of time, will eventually start to obsess on the idiosyncrasies of their bowels (Tim Cahill has commented on this at length ). And, in places where toilet paper seldom exists (such as Asia), there is much debate about just how sanitary it...

"Many Americans can easily identify with modernization, technology and the Internet because one of the most important things these do is increase individual choices. At their best, they empower and emancipate the individual. But for traditional societies, such as Egypt's, the collective, the group, is much more important than the individual, and empowering the individual...

"The Wahabis, followers of a fanatical Moslem heresy, had impressed their strict rules on easy and civilized Kasim. In Kasim there was but little coffee-hospitality, much prayer and fasting, no tobacco, no artistic dalliance with women, no silk clothes, no gold or silver head ropes or ornaments. Everything was forcibly pious or forcibly puritanical. It...

"Nihilism as a mere philosophical indulgence may prove socially quite harmless. Nevertheless, what we are witnessing in the world today is an active form of nihilism in social and political realms threatening the very fabric of human existence. [It] assumes various names, and it is so tragic and unfortunate that some of those names bear...