Based on an essay by Edmund Wilson. In Jackson Square, the spidermums, spotted in Newport ash, are blooming like supplicants. A pack of cougars, celebrating a second marriage at the Magnolia bakery, are flaunting plastic diadems. In Central Park,...

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Philip Roth has not yet left the building. We will note that Roth, growing more in his later years, has already taken pains to prepare us for the inevitable. His alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman has ushered us through the epic...

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While I've been buried in schoolwork and otherwise unresponsive...I had a few things to share. #1: What winter looks like from my desk: #2: What American flags in the clearance section of Bed Bath and Beyond look like: #3: The...

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Baseball in America is alive and well in Alabama. Or maybe America in baseball is alive and well in Alabama, where outside of Birmingham, our national pastime still thrills, if only as sideshow to a more salient national pastime,...

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Waffle House is, at the exact same time, an unabashed and guilty pleasure of mine. It's a difficult paradox to explain, but I will try my best (especially for Northeast and West Coast readers). Three hours past Washington, D.C.,...

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Saturday we were talking about getting old and it's funny because we're not but these conversations are the conversations had until it's finally true. Saturday's idee fixe (and the idee fixe of most Saturdays) on aging came out of spending...

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It all started with Edward Albee... Well, it actually started with a walk home from work. Or it started with the 76 degree June day that prompted the urge to walk. It was a straight shot down 5th Avenue (of...

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For a newcomer, the rook appears like the least formidable piece on the back row; there is the misconception that the order of pieces from center [king through queen through bishop through knight through rook and forward to pawn]...

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...After all the news and speeches and soapboxes and posturing and ideas and conventions and the hatred and the mistrust, the long bouts of hours in vans or buses and meals and streets spent with the “them” delegate of “us and them,” I found that Bush’s sentences (or Michael Gerson’s rather) sound almost the same as they do out of the mouths of the Arab contingents that Bush describes. It’s just that the “us” and the “them” are simply switched.

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From the top of the Herodion outside of Bethlehem, you can see a great deal. To the north, you can look into Bethlehem to the Church of the Nativity and Rachel's Tomb... and beyond the first set of hills, into...

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My last night in Jerusalem, I grab dinner near the Faisal and decompress by the television with the locals at the hostel. Sidenote: I've just found out this morning that the owner of the hostel (Hisham) a sweet guy with...

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To elaborate on my postcards from Ramallah last week, I first owe a huge debt of gratitude to my compeer Lilit at Heeb magazine for sharing the pictures with Jewschool. Ultimately, Ramallah is one of those places that some of...

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...It's a small cobwebbed building that inspires a modest patriotism; you sit in this small room probably the size of the Oval Office (except it's rectangular) and wonder how people, so few people, would decide to be heroic enough to to actually sign a document that the world endorsed but their neighbors would never accept. You wonder why they keep signing documents that all its neighbors will never accept. Is the heroism in having that faith?

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...Israel is an idea. Hebrew and Arabic are its official languages. In its biggest museum, there are Monet paintings given from the Jews of Paris and Signac works given from Antwerp. Max Ernst has donated twelve of his own paintings to hang beside Arab artists, political sculptures and photography that encapsulate the sentient conversations of Israeli society today. Biblically-themed art is rampant and Marc Chagall is difficult to miss. There are names of Jewish artists you've never heard of, their dates of birth tend to begin in the early 20th century and the years of their deaths lay heavily between the years 1941-1945.

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Born in Iran, modified in Syria, fired from Lebanon; the Katyusha cannot hit strategic targets with accuracy. This is a close-up of what was struck on August 13. The house was on the corner of the major road that the...

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After the sirens stop, I give a vendor at the station my last unexchanged $20 and tell him to take his cart to the soldiers and pass out ice cream. He doesn't argue with me. I leave the station to...

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...The reality for a naïve Westerner arrives, a missile fired indiscriminately with no aim but for life has actually just exploded into a mountain of neighborhoods less than half a mile away. There are broken roofs and ball bearings and other unimaginable things pressing further in that morbid spectrum. It reads much simpler on newspaper pages, especially since it’s rarely this border’s story.

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...His real name is Itzik. He was born in Greece and moved here when he was two. He has one son, three daughters, does not mention his wife. He normally works as a taxi driver and a bus driver in alternating weeks, but has time off because of the lack of tourism. He speaks English, Greek, French, Arabic, and Hebrew. He fought in Lebanon during the 1982 invasion. He is completely broken. He stammers and repeats increments of time to denote when he thinks the war will end, when there will be quiet, when he won’t stay up all night smoking and coughing.

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... At the site where Rabin was shot, I anticipate a crowd to be there (considering the day’s unsteadiness, Nasrallah’s threats to strike Tel Aviv), people appealing for a sense of strength induced by a scene like Memphis might have been for Americans in the late 1960s.

No one is at the Rabin memorial so I walk around the corner to the square where the peace rally took place before Rabin was assassinated. ...

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I decide to wonder who can teach a person to ever feel as powerful as an indigent street magician, as disquieting as a consternating chanteuse, or at most, as hollow as a faithless theologian. After all, how the lessons are constructed and how they are absorbed are entirely subjective and completely arbitrary, most people miss them, perhaps more than once. But sometimes they seem to arrive on unexceptional afternoons. Sometimes they have to be sought out. Sometimes they have to be bankrolled by trust funds. I won’t bother mentioning what was on the news when I finally got home.

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