A blog of interest on various issues; insights on the Mideast.
"A bit about me: I’m 23, I’m half-Dutch, half-Egyptian, and I grew up in Lusaka, Zambia. I moved to Egypt for university, where I studied sociology, psychology & anthropology. Then I moved to the Netherlands, where I got an MA in Islam in the West and then another one in Development Studies. I just started a PhD."
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"Every six months or so, The Audit, CJR’s financial-journalism blog, holds a breakfast to update interested parties on how the blog is doing. Each breakfast has an invited speaker, and so it was that I found myself at 7:45 this morning in a very posh Upper East Side club, being offered an array of ties to choose from before being allowed upstairs to take my seat between Nicholas Lemann and Victor Navasky.
The main thrust of my speech, which rapidly became a spirited and high-level discussion, was that journalistic entities — newspapers, magazines, websites, and, yes, Columbia J-school itself — have to start putting much more emphasis on reading, as opposed to writing."
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"I first spoke to Moroccan civil liberty activist Maria Karim in May, before her friend and colleague, rapper Lhaqed (the enraged) was sentenced to one year in prison for insulting authorities with a music video made for his song Kleb Adawla, Dog of the State.
Tomorrow, Karim will stand trial for allegedly insulting a prosecutor representing the state in the Lhaqed trial.
Then as now, I was impressed by Karim's laughter – it creeps up at the most inopportune moments in our conversations.
“In Morocco, we don't need Kafka,” she said today, over the phone from Casablanca, laughing.
“Every day in our country is a testament to absurdity.”
It's not for me to say if the laughter comes from fear, existentialism, indifference – feigned or real or a courage of conviction. Here is a transcript of our conversation..."
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