I can’t seem to paste screenshots into the comments. The wall is hard to see in Longman’s shot, but here it is in blue below.

Readers had trouble seeing what I was referring to in my last post, Invisible Land. Here are some snips. 

Here is Longman’s shot. I’ve circled where the wall is located. His shot was taken in the evening on a somewhat cloudy day, so the circled location is relatively dark, rendering the wall hard to see in a photo. It’s not hard to see by the naked eye. Continue reading →

James Longman is a well-known British journalist currently traveling the world, including Israel, on an extended reporting assignment. This photo below is from his Twitter feed: here he is in Jerusalem about two weeks ago, looking eastward from a well known spot in the city. On a “clear Jerusalem evening,” what he sees when he looks to the east are the Jordanian mountains in the distance, dozens of miles away.

Continue reading →

In all the years that I taught moral philosophy, I never once taught business ethics. Truth to be told, I went out of my way to avoid it. Given an opportunity to teach classes in the MBA program at my university, which reimbursed at a higher rate than the School of Arts & Sciences, I turned it down. The very idea of business bored me to tears. The idea of teaching it seemed tedious beyond tears. A couple hundred dollars here or there weren’t going to compensate for the waste of time and brain power involved in teaching such a dumb-ass class. So I bagged it. Continue reading →

This is a journey meant for your anxiety.
–Rob Zombie, “American Witch”

I don’t know whether to say this is a story “straight out of the Jersey suburbs,” or “straight out of a Rob Zombie song,” but I guess those aren’t mutually exclusive: the Jersey suburbs are something out of a Rob Zombie song.

When Bobbi Wilson, 9, took it upon herself to spend hours of her summer aiming to obliterate the invasive spotted lanternflies that were ravaging her northern New Jersey community, she did not expect much attention. She just wanted to help.

She went out to the streets of her neighborhood in Caldwell, N.J., armed with a container with a mix of dish soap and water — a recipe to disarm the bugs that she found on TikTok, and enhanced by adding apple cider vinegar. She was determined to get as many of the insects as she could.

But her one-girl extermination campaign got her reported to the police about three months after it started, when a neighbor complained about a “little Black woman, walking and spraying stuff on the sidewalks and trees” a few houses from the girl’s home on Oct. 22, according to a recording of the call obtained by CNN.

Make sure you click on the CNN link for that video: priceless. “There’s a little black woman, walkin’ and sprayin’ stuff on the sidewalks and trees, on Elizabeth and Florence. I don’t know what the hell she’s doin’. Scares me, though. Real tiny. She’s got a hood on.” Continue reading →

The last time I was in Pakistan, back in January of 2012, my cousin Sa’ad threw me a big, lavish party the evening before my departure. I have a very large extended family, much of it based in Lahore, and just about everyone from Lahore, it seemed, was there–aunts, uncles, first cousins, first cousins once removed, first cousins twice removed, spouses of cousins, and all other manner of kith and kin. My cousin Sa’ad and his brother Salman are major players in the Pakistani political establishment, part of the government at the time, but allied with Nawaz Sharif, then out of power as Prime Minister.* Many of my other cousins are political activists of one sort or another, not always friendly to governments in power. It makes for interesting dinner conversation, and it certainly did that particular night. Continue reading →