In 1941, the Republican, anti-Communist publishing magnate, Henry Luce, son of American missionaries, member of Yale’s Skulls and Bones, the secretive organization dramatized in Robert de Niro’s 2006 film, The…
Editorials
A Moroccan Star is Born
I am not sure whether I am saying this correctly, but reading Laila Lalami’s novel, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, feels as if literature has spoken directly to me for…
The Internet Galaxy
To round up my reflections on the computer age, I read Manuel Castells’s reflections on the impact of the Internet on our lives and the future of humanity itself. Castells’s…
Turkey
On December 15th, 2005, I sat at the Mevlana Cultural Center in Konya, Turkey and raised my hand in prayer with the shaykh at the end of the sama’ ceremony,…
Secrets of the Bazaar
There is a lot of talk lately about outsourcing and globalization as the sure recipes for a better world, but for years computer hackers in the netherworld of the virtual…
Looking for Leonardo
A set of personal circumstances, in addition to the projections of Morocco’s High Commissioner for Planning (Haut commissaire au Plan), Mr. Ahmed Lahlimi, for the year 2030, have led me…
Dispatches from Morocco
I just finished reading a delightful account of contemporary Morocco published in 2001 by Stephen O. Hughes, a British journalist who has lived in and reported from Morocco since the…
A National Language
Morocco’s official language is Arabic, but Moroccans speak darija, a dialect made up of Arabic and French, if one lives south of Ksar El Kebir; Arabic and Spanish, if one…
Morocco 2010
On May 15, the world soccer federation, known by its French acronym FIFA, will render a decision of supreme importance not only to Morocco’s medium-term future but also to world…
End of Story
I have just learned about the death of my favorite Moroccan writer at the age of 63. Endowed with a fierce, subversive spirit, raised in the halls of misery and…