Recent Columns

Good friends, a hospital tragedy, and a lack of toilet paper in public washrooms.

The western and Islamic worlds clearly don’t understand one another, as the botched Newsweek report on the Koran clearly shows.

Clearly the marriage gods were telling me something. Your marriage is something very noble. Don’t blow it. Because, yes, it also has the potential to burst into flames.

It not only returns life to its natural pace, but the bicycle is the great leveller.

In Uganda, the land has uncommon beauty, and life has its own strange mix of dark memories of killings, talk of restorative justice, and forgiveness.

Booming, oil-rich city is luring outsiders. That s likely why it feels so hollow.

The feet of ‘ragged men’, Vincent Van Gogh and the story of the prodigal son all come to mind as Easter dawns in Yemen.

Daniel Pearl and Walid al-Saqqaf would have enjoyed furthering Muslim-Jewish dialogue in, say, some juice bar in Tehran with Bob Dylan playing.

I treat most things said here in Yemen about Jews with skepticism. The latest gem came from a Yemeni colleague ranting, in an unpublished column, about the so-called Jewish conspiracy. He cited the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purportedly Jewish texts from the late 1800s, describing Jewish plans to enslave the world.

Chronic illiteracy in Yemen reflects the belief that teaching a woman to read will empower her at the expense of men.

We’ll never know why some parts of the human family get more than their share of natural disasters such as tsunamis.

Merry Christmas, don't get too busy, and remember: don't eat too many cookies, because you still have to get around next year.

I hate politics. You can't trust anyone. I mean, if I was Maqtada Al-Sadr, the dangerously political Shiite cleric who's jostling for position in Iraq now, I wouldn't trust my grandmother.

Thanks for that gift from last year, the Gulliver's Travels book. Very nice choice. The Houyhnhnms, those horse-like characters, were so bright, so noble. And those savage Yahoos: so dim, so lost. Poor Gulliver couldn't see himself in them.

If we are in a so-called war of civilizations, the biggest battlefields may not be in places like Iraq but in the classroom.