What do you expect?

A friend took a trip to visit some relatives with her son. Since they hadn’t seen her son in years, she went expecting them to have some curiosity about his family, his life, his plans.It never happened. They ate together, they laughed, they talked, but the relatives never once spoke of ... Continue reading

Street dreams

My boyhood, and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling for well over three decades, are anchored in the Arab world. And the tragedy of Arab political culture has been the unending expectation of the crowd — the street, we call it — in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline, who ... Continue reading