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….

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 ….

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….

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….

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….

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