So much of what we see and hear about the Middle East focuses on what we call politics, which is essentially ideology. But when it comes to the Middl….

One of the unspoken themes that I'm grappling with in Day of Honey is the relationship between violence and cosmopolitanism. It's one thing to compre….

Americans are curious about the texture of everyday life in the Middle East because they rarely get to see it. I wanted readers to feel like they wer….

For my generation - the "Children of Nixon," as I call us in the book - the Lebanese civil war was an iconic event. Downtown Beirut became a metaphor….

I don't have a problem with the media focusing on bad things happening. That's our job, after all. But I think it's incomplete, and I would even say ….

Pedro Teixeira, the great Portuguese merchant-adventurer, wrote a beautiful description of a coffeehouse with windows overlooking the Tigris and the ….

There's a long history in the Middle East of "bread intifadas," starting with 1977 in Egypt, when Anwar Sadat tried to lift bread subsidies. People r….

Part of the reason you see so little about this in the Western media is that Iraq was closed off from the outside world for so long under Saddam. But….

As a journalist, or an anthropologist, the convention is that people are there for you to study, and they are your objects..

The Middle East is the only region in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa where rates of malnutrition actually rose over the past decade or two, ….

You [can] become part of someone else's narrative. Every once in a while I would get people asking me questions like, "If your husband is a Muslim, t….

Rulers like Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser started subsidizing bread as a way to buy loyalty, or at least obedience, and this system became so pervasive ….

But being an American woman married to an Arab guy - and a Muslim to boot! - put me in a different category. People would open up, and tell me things….

How can a country be home to sectarian militias and yet also to people who are educated, sophisticated, and pluralistic? This is not a simple matter.….

We're taught that domestic life is not a "serious" political topic, like war and peace, but the fact is that we spend most of our lives doing everyda….

In the Middle East, bread is so essential to everyday life that word for it in Egyptian Arabic is aish, which means life. It's always been the staple….

I'm optimistic, though. Now, with the Arab Spring, I think that people in the region are beginning to overturn some of these clichés, and Western edi….

But how can you understand a war without any knowledge of the society where it happens? It's like trying to understand birth without knowing anything….

If you look at the list of the top wheat importers for 2010, almost half of them are Middle Eastern regimes: Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Sa….

The problem is that so many of them are not getting told. This is a massive problem, not just in the Middle East but for places from Africa to Afghan….

I chose to write about food: food is inherently political, but it's also an essential part of people's real lives. It's where the public and private ….