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The surreal experience of visiting Libya
With news today that Col. Gaddafi called in Libyan fighter jets to bomb pro-democracy protesters, a strange man gets only stranger and I am reminded of the surreal weeks I spent traveling across Libya...
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How my journey to Beirut ended up on an art gallery wall
In preparation for a trip to Lebanon to write about the art scene in Beirut, I interviewed Negar Azimi, who is an editor at Bidoun, a Middle East arts magazine that is a favorite of mine. She used to...
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Visiting the land of ethnic cleansing
The news this week that the Bosnian Serb leader Ratko Mladic — wanted, most famously, for his role in the Srebrenica massacre though guilty of much else — was caught living in Serbia is a reminder...
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Norway and the loss of innocence
There were so many troubling threads to the attacks in Norway that it is difficult to unbundle them all. There were the 600+ comments on the initial New York Times article, many of them speculating...
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They are dancing in Tripoli
As I write this, armed rebels are dancing in Tripoli’s Green Square. The rebellion started in the east, around Benghazi, and was followed by months of fighting, with the rebels often showing more...
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Seif al-Islam captured in the Sahara
With news today that Seif al-Islam el-Gaddafi has been captured, the Gaddafi era in Libya appears to have come to a definitive close. Seif al-Islam was the cat with nine lives: a playboy turned...
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A vial of Saharan sand from the Acacus region in Libya
This small film canister is filled with an almost downy-fine sand that I collected in 2004 in the Acacus region in southwestern Libya, near the border with Algeria and Niger. When seen running off in...
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The Yugoslav war reappears in Syria
I have long admired the At War column in the New York Times, which looks at conflicts through the prism of arms and materiel rather than political or social trends as is common elsewhere. CJ Chivers...
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How I got to Libya one month after the embargo was lifted
Though the anniversary is little noticed, it was precisely ten years ago that the US embargo on Libya was lifted and the country was brought in from the cold. I remember this principally because at...
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The ancient theater in Sabratha, Libya
Most of the found objects I post are things that I have come upon in my travels but have not created myself, but recently I was reading about the downward spiral of violence in Libya following the...
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My pick for travel in 2016 is Iran
When Travel + Leisure asked me to help put together its list of top travel destinations for 2016 — it was published yesterday so you can see the full slideshow here — my choice was clear: Iran. The...
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