You can escape the freezing winter snows and winds of Kabul by taking only a three-hour drive east through the Silk Gorge to Jalalabad, where oranges are being harvested. You can escape the humid summer heat in marshy Kunduz, where temperatures often exceed forty degrees Celsius, by moving to the mountains of Badakhshan. – Thomas Barfield: […]

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify […]

Soon after the Lebanese civil war began, and the museum was engulfed in cross fire, the most precious pieces were spirited away and hidden, but the big statues, bas-reliefs, and stelae in the main halls were impossible to move. So Chehab had wooden frames built around each piece and then filled those frames with poured […]