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Mr. Lawrence, gentlemen, thank you for taking the time to talk with me. If an indication of greatness in a work of art is its relevance to future generations, then David Lean's
Lawrence of Arabia is getting better all the time. I saw the film again last weekend for the first time since the Iraq War. You can construct an astute critique of the situation in the Gulf today merely by judiciously quoting the script verbatim. For example...I would like to start by asking you to comment, Sir, on the suspicions many Arabs have regarding the Coalition's ambitions in the region.
LAWRENCE: I've told them that that's false: that we've no ambitions in Arabia, have we?ALLENBY: I'm not a politician, thank God. Have we any ambition in Arabia, Dryden?
DRYDEN: Difficult question, sir.
LAWRENCE: I want to know, sir, if I can tell them in your name that we have no ambitions in Arabia.
ALLENBY: Certainly.
That is gratifying, but surely you agree that Coalition and Iraqi interests do not automatically align. For example, in the preferential granting of oil exploration rights?
BRIGHTON: I must ask you not to speak like that, sir. British and Arab interests are one and the same.FEISAL: Possibly.
ALI: Ha! Ha!
I see. Ah, Mr. Bentley, from the Chicago Courier, you had a question?
BENTLEY: One: What, in your opinion, do these people hope to gain from this war?LAWRENCE: They hope to gain their freedom. Freedom.
BENTLEY: They hope to gain their freedom. There's one born every minute.
LAWRENCE: They're going to get it, Mr Bentley. I'm going to give it to them. The second question?
No, that's enough from him. I would like instead to gauge your sentiments on what is next for the region. Is there a hitlist of rogue states? Is Syria next? Surely such aims can only be a pipe dream at this juncture?
BRIGHTON: Dreaming won't get you to Damascus, sir, but discipline will. Look, sir, Great Britain is a small country; it's much smaller than yours; a small population compared with some; it's small but it's great, and why?ALI: Because it has guns!
BRIGHTON: Because it has discipline!
FEISAL: Because it has a navy; because of this, the English go where they please and strike where they please and this makes them great.
LAWRENCE: Right.
So might makes right? That's quite an audacious statement, Prince Feisal. But this hasn't stopped your Arabian Kingdom from throwing in your lot on the side of the coalition's might.
FEISAL: And I must do it because the Turks have European guns, but I fear to do it; upon my soul, I do. The English have a great hunger for desolate places. I fear they hunger for Arabia.LAWRENCE: Then you must deny it to them.
What do you mean by that, Sir? You're not seriously prescribing pan-Arabism as a solution?
LAWRENCE: So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people; a silly people; greedy, barbarous, and cruel, as you are.
I'm only being cruel to be kind in my questioning, Mr. Lawrence. But perhaps I'll allow a softball question. What was your favorite bit of the war?
LAWRENCE: We've taken Aqaba.BRIGHTON: Taken Aqaba? Who has?
I think he is confusing Aqaba with Umm Qasr, Colonel Brighton. 
Understandable, they're both their respective country's only port. I'm sorry, do continue Mr. Lawrence. Did you meet stiff resistance on the part of the Iraqis?
LAWRENCE: No, they're still there, but they've no boots. Prisoners, sir. We took them prisoners; the entire garrison. No, that's not true. We killed some; too many really. I'll manage it better next time. There's been a lot of killing, one way or another. Cross my heart and hope to die, it's all perfectly true.
And how... Yes, Mr. Bentley, what is it now?
BENTLEY: Well, it's just I heard in Cairo that Major Lawrence has a horror of bloodshed.FEISAL: That is exactly so. With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion: with me it is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable.
Let me guess; yours? But you yourself have been quite expert at playing off against each other the interests of the Americans, British, Russians, Iranians...
FEISAL: ... and the French interest too, of course. We must not forget the French now...
Quite. One final question, If I may. Looking forward, what do you see as the lasting impact of this war, say 10 years from now?
DRYDEN: Well. It seems we're to have a British waterworks with an Arab flag on it. Do you think it was worth it?ALLENBY: Not my business. Thank God I'm a soldier!
Thank you gentlemen.
There 
Sweden has the highest per-capita number of cinema screens in Europe, according to this book, which is also the source of the images and information for this post.is a brilliant new performance space in Stockholm, but it is in desperate need of talent.
It's the Draken Cinema, a standout example of Swedish modernist design. The main room is spectacular, with a very unusual all-beech arched ceiling that reminded me of the wooden concert hall at the Sydney Opera House. Built in 1938, it is one of many classic Stockholm cinemas, but it was closed in the mid-90s as it was simply too large to profit from its one screen and over 1,000 seats.
On Saturday, it reopened in its new guise as space for occasional events. Instead of rows of seats, there are now terraces flowing towards the stage, with tables and chairs on them. The potential for this place is enormous. Upgrade the Ikea furniture, replace the ad-hoc (but cheap) student-run bar in the back with what Sturehof has on offer, put the zitty kids in black tie, set a latin Jazz band on stage, and you'd have yourself the swishiest, grooviest nightclub this side of, er, Berlin.
We were among the first in — a misunderstanding on Anna's part (this night out was all her doing) — so we had plenty of time to catch up on politics over vodkas Anna was for the Iraq war, but against the Afghanistan war. I was thoroughly confounded.. This was a good thing, for the booze inured us against the assault on our musical taste that followed.
First up: Two guys with synthesizers wearing scarves made from Christmas tree lights. One of them had discovered how to electronically alter the tone of his voice and proceeded to sing old Swedish songs as a girl for half an hour. They both put cardboard boxes over their heads. Maybe they were ashamed.
Then there was a very long intermission. We wondered where the next act was. Then we wished we hadn't. Next up, three guys with synthesizers and a drummer with no sense of timing. They proceeded to play traditional Lap polyphonic songs transcribed for three synthesizers and arhythmic drums. Or they might have been.
Next up, a guy who performed for exactly 20 seconds (no synth), followed immediately by one guy on a synthesizer and a singer. They did Talking Heads/Cure inspired music, without the inspiration. Then we left. No wonder they drink themselves into a stupor here. I certainly had to. I consequently have no idea who these people were, who organized it and why. But I do know Draken deserves a whole lot better than this.
This blog has at times been quite obsessed with the musings of Andrew Sullivan, mainly because if there is one thing which exasperates me it is seemingly smart, articulate people spouting absolute nonsense. Naomi Klein is his left-wing equivalent.This was the case with his defense of the ideas of Pim Fortuyn, another person to which this criticism applies. It was also the case with his early strong push for war with Iraq. But a person can only take so much, and I stopped reading his blog as it evolved into a shrill one-note take on the world. Being predictable is not a good thing for a blog to be. Why bother reading itEspecially if you do not allow comments, which goes against the concept of the blog as dialogue.?
Sullivan does have one feather in his cap. His single-minded pursuit of fellow Republican Trent Lott a few months ago for his on-the-record support for segregation resulted in Lott losing the cherished US Senate majority leadership position. Now, Sullivan has a new target in his sights: Senator Santorum, That name sounds so Star Wars-like. Palpatine, Santorum, Sebulba... Which of these is not like the other?who seems to be for legislating against gay sex. Sullivan, who is gay, may not win this latest round, but not for want of trying.
Which leads me to the original thought in this post (sorry to take so long): Sullivan may have finally solved that dilemma first formulated by Woody Allen all those years ago in his exordium to Annie Hall:
The-the other important joke for me is one that's, uh, usually attributed to Groucho Marx, but I think it appears originally in Freud's wit and its relation to the unconscious. And it goes like this-I'm paraphrasing: Uh ... "I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member."
The recipe for happiness, then, is simple: Join a club that would rather not have you as a member. For good measure, Sullivan has joined two: The Catholic Church, which calls homosexuality a sin, and the Republican Party, which believes Santorum is an "inclusive" man, as the President opinedIt's April 27, and it is snowing outside!.
There is something unusual about a gay person so determined to label himself as not just religious, not just Christian, but Catholic, of all things. The differences between denominations are doctrinal, and the intelligent religious person, surely, will see that these schisms are the work of Man, not God. So join a more tolerant faith, already! But not Sullivan: He has joined a group of people whose tenets are clearly homophobic, and now protests too loudly all the way to communion.
As for his Republicanism, it is even odder, in my mind. He is British, first off, cannot even vote, certainly can't register to vote and hence has absolutely no use for labeling himself Republican. Why can't he just be the sum of his beliefs? Is he under the impression that attaching a label to his thoughts confers some kind of prestige? Andrew Sullivan, label whoreLabel whore: "Someone who only wears brand name clothes, with the name of the brand usually placed somewhere for all to see. A walking advertisement for a clothing store or brand." ?
I believe, despite protests to the contrary, that he truly enjoys his pained crises of conscience. They are entirely of his own making. But perhaps there are signs that enough is enough: This week he said that "it is beginning to make it simply impossible for gay people and their families - or any tolerant person - to vote for the president's party." Is he preparing us for a highly public defection?
Don't count on it. But it may become necessary to read Sullivan again. Not for the quality of the discourse, but as a psychological drama.
The New Yorker, arriving in Stockholm with a month's delay, has been unreadable of late, because nothing destroys my interest in a thriller more than knowing the plot. And I certainly know the plot of this war. So I've turned to the online samplings, in effect mortgaging my future pleasures to tide me over during this intellectual dust storm from paper-based pundits.
But it is with great pleasure that I discovered Anthony Lane's review of Lilja 4-Ever online, and I feel gratified that he seems to have liked it as much as I do; for the strange thing about this film is that you do not just care about Lilja, you come to care about the movie itself. It's the kind of movie you want to make sure your friends see. I still get flashbacks from specific scenes: the deflated basketball, Lilja in the mud, her name carved in the bench, and that Rammstein music...
But what is up with the name change? Why does it have to be called Lilya 4-Ever in its US release? it's not as if the intended audience—the usual east coast art-house crowd and not a soul more—are in danger of mispronouncing the name, and in doing so deciding to forego it.
Jesus was executed by Pontius Pilate because he was a rabble-rouser. This much is agreed by scholars. What kind of rabble-rouser he was is the topic of heated debate. I've long cherished the notion that Jesus was a political operative, a separatist agitating against collaboration with the Roman occupiers, invoking God's authority to legitimize his cause. This is not an inherently atheistic stance—liberation theology has taken this view and run with it—but it does recast Jesus's motives on a much more human scale.
I took this composite shot of the Temple Mount in the winter of 2000/2001. Click to enlarge.
Recently, this view has fallen into relative disfavor. The weight of scholarly opinion has shifted towards a strictly eschatological Jesus, one who went around preaching the imminent end of the world and the coming kingdom of God, not 2,000+ years hence but in a matter of weeks.
Whenever there is such controversy, The New York Review of Books—that ambulance chaser of scholarly conflict—seems hell-bent on asking the proponent of one camp to disparage review a recently published work of a professional rival. And thus we have E.P. Sanders, Art and Sciences Professor of Religion at Duke, reviewing Crossan and Reed's Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts.It's in the April 10 Edition of NYRB, which has just arrived in Stockholm in time for Easter. The New Yorker issues are longer in the coming—in the latest issue, I am still subject to quickly aging pre-war presaging.
Alas, the Sanders article is not available for free online. But a Sanders co-conspirator, Paula Fredrikson at Boston University, has an engaging (if oddly formatted) overview of all the Jesuses in play today:
We have one apocalyptic Jesus. He caused a scene in the Temple to symbolically enact a prophecy of impending redemption (Sanders). We have two non-apocalyptic Jesuses, a Cynic and a Jewish Cynic. The Cynic Jesus went up to Jerusalem as a normal pilgrim and was killed—no Temple tantrum (Mack, Seeley). The Jewish Cynic Jesus went up for the first time in his life that one Passover. Disgusted by what he saw (he had had no idea, remember, what Jerusalem would be like), he overturned the tables, thereby symbolically destroying the Temple's brokerage function (Crossan). And, finally, we have one metaphorically apocalyptic anti-nationalist Jesus who went up to Jerusalem at Passover to confront the Temple system, which he symbolically challenged, indicted and condemned (Borg, Wright).
But what about Fredrikson's Jesus?
I had an apocalyptic Jesus who went up to Jerusalem for Passover at or as the climax of his mission. He symbolically enacted the Temple's impending destruction. The gesture implied no condemnation of his native religion but, rather, announced the imminent coming of a new Temple and, hence, as well, God's kingdom. The act brought him to the attention of the priests, who became alarmed at the potential for mass disturbance during the holiday when Pilate was in town. They facilitated his arrest, and Pilate killed him.
Which Jesus is the most likely is beginning to depend more and more on circumstantial evidence, hence the quest for historical context. Sanders counters Crossan's rendition of a Jesus engaging in "resistance against the distributive injustice of Roman-herodian commercialization"Life imitating the art of Monty Python? by examining precisely how much Jewish agrarian life had been altered by Roman influence. His answer: little to not at all. Eventually, it gets personal, as such matters are wont to do, and Sanders posits that Crossan's bias in favor of a rebellious Jesus is based on Crossan being Irish, with the Romans and the British in the role of oppressor.
But what is interesting is that none of the various versions of Jesus imbue the founder of Christianity with particularly flattering attributes. Sanders calls Crossan's Jesus "a minor social deviant and critic." Fredrikson calls her apocalyptic Jesus "an embarrassment" to later Christian apologists, thus:
Jesus securely anchored in his first-century Jewish apocalyptic context—working miracles, driving†away demons, predicting the imminent end of the world—is an embarrassment. Is it sheer serendipity that so many of our reconstructions define away the offending awkwardness? Miracles without cures, time without end, resurrections without bodies. The kingdom does not come, it is present as an experience, a kinder, gentler society, mediated, indeed created, by Jesus. Then what is this kingdom language doing here anyway?
For me, the most refreshing aspect of reading this research is the lack of any concern on the part of scholars as to whether Jesus was the son of God or not. All assume that a charlatan or a psychotic would have had as much a chance of garnering a movement as the real deal.
Regardless of which he is, Jesus can be useful, especially as a repository for parables when trying to make a point with people who belong to prayer groups. And there is clearly use for one now regarding the reconstruction of Iraq when arguing with the Presidents' men. Contracts need to be awarded. Should they go to American companies? British companies? Certainly not French and German companies? What Would Jesus Do?
Naomi Klein sees nothing but nefariousness in US motives. She starts off well, but gets a bit shrill by the end. She loses credibility when she seriously suggests that the Iraq war was fought because "'free trade' by less violent means hasn't been going that well lately." What an unsubtle appeal to Marxian dialectics!
In the other corner sit the newly smug neocons, who feel that since they made the effort, they should reap some spoils, in the guise of a long-lasting military presence and a preeminent role in the reconstruction of Iraq.
I think both sides miss the point. What we need to do here is render unto Caesar. If the US is paying, by all means award those contracts to American companies. It's the traditional way of dispensing aid and pleasing your constituents. If the funds are coming from Iraq's oil revenues, or if the exploitation rights of that oil are being sold, then it should be up to an Iraqi representative government, which, if it so chooses, can hand it to the French.
The seeming lack of overwhelming gratitude on the part of Iraq's civil society towards the US is probably borne from a suspicion of America's intentions, a suspicion they do not seem to harbor about the British. The indigenous representative government that will form from this inchoate mess may not be as pro-American as Bush hopes. To what extent will there be pressure to ensure collaboration with the invading force? And for how long? These are all reasons to get the UN involved as soon as possible. The best way for the US to prove to its critics that it had only its own safety in mind and not its commercial interests is to not pursue those interests too ruthlessly. Do as Jesus would: Heal, but do it for free. It worked for him.
In London yesterday morning, BBC television news carried a quitessential New York story: a bouncer had been stabbed and killed by a patron after the patron had been asked to stop smoking inside a nightclub, as required by a new law. In the 15 seconds it aired, a camera panned across a purple awning that looked, well, familiar.
It was. It was Guernica, I later found out. Guernica sits atop the legendary Save the Robots, which sits atop the mythicalA seriously outdated web review still includes Save the Robots. Robots, an original East Village punk establishment. I caught the tail end of Save the Robots when I settled on Saint Marks in 1996. Save the Robots sat across empty lots on Avenue B, between 2nd and 3rd, and was the default destination whenever a 4am closing time at 7B We always suspected 7B was actually called The Horseshoe Bar, or maybe Vazac's but it often proved easier to conflate name and location, especially as their Jack and cokes barely ever had any coke in them. Many of the beat poets drank their livers away at the corner of 7th and B—Allen Ginsberg lived around the corner. was not reason enough to call it a night.
Save the Robots had a smoky cellar for a dance floor where seriously loud techno-cum-punk was played without apologies out of a cage where the DJ protected his records. The place was open all night, so club kids developed the strategy of sleeping in Tompkins Square Park during the days and frequenting Save the Robots at night. Spending the night in Tompkins Square Park was no longer possible after 1989, when the park acquired closing hours in order to remove the tent city that had sprung up there. The result was some pretty darn serious riots.In those days, the aide mÈmoire for navigating Alphabet City still rang true: A is for Adventurous, B is for Brave, C is for Crazy, D is for Dead.
By around 1997 or 1998, the place was closed on account of one too many drug busts. It was ridiculously easy to score drugs there, Not that I ever tried. or rather, it had been. Giuliani's Quality of Life Campaign was extending into the foxholes of the alternatively lifestyled, and popping pills on the raised sofas of the main room was just not on anymore, especially now that those empty lots were being filled with "medium income" housing and their attendant families.
In its place came Guernica. It remains one of the better places to dance in the East Village, but youThe best is Sapphire Lounge. Still, although New York is many things, dance capital is not one of them. have to make a beeline past yuppie scum to a fresh downstairs dance space. How strange that after all those years as a druggie landmark of sorts, somebody would end up being killed at the place over a cigarette.
It's too early to decide with hindsight just how just this war on Iraq will have been, but events are certainly tilting in favour Iím in London for the long weekend for my sisterís wedding, so you will be getting English spellings for the duration of my stay.of the war party. The welcome given to US troops in Baghdad was undeniably moving, though not as pervasive as Fox News will have us believe.
Even CNN glossed over some points that were more accurately reported by non-US media. Unbridled gratitude towards the US was by no means the only emotion. Writing in Sweden's Dagens Nyheter, their correspondent noted that spontaneous discussions broke out among strangers on the streets, who, free for the first time to speak openly in over 20 years, berated the moronic marine who had to go drape an American flag upside down over the statue's head. An upside down flag is an international distress signal, I was told by the helpful retired general on CNN; which leads me to wonder how the Japanese show distress. Perhaps they never do.She also pointed out that almost all of the celebrants were Shi'ite Muslims, persecuted by Saddam, whereas the more pokerfaced bystanders were Sunni.
Al Jazeera coverage was deflated; they could not bring themselves to show the scenes of celebration at the demise of a Saddam statue for the hour I watched them last night, noting (correctly) that there were relatively few people out on the streets, the bulk of Baghdad remaining at home. But the jubilation was infectious. When their correspondent was asked the leading question as to why the Americans needed to gloat by tearing down a statue of Saddam, he corrected the anchor, saying that it was the Iraqis who wanted the statue toppled, but that they couldn't manage it by themselves, that they enlisted the help of the Americans; he even suggested that this was somehow symbolic of the entire conflict. On Al Jazeera!
This positive reception in Baghdad will take the sting out of the argument that the coalition is leading a war of aggression against Arabs. But it is important to remember that, much like the killing of Iraqi civilians in coalition bombings was collateral damage, giving Iraqis an open society is a collateral benefit of a war justified by the US on an unrelated legal case.
Giving Iraqis the gift of democracy is not worth $100 billion and 150 coalition lives. That level of sacrifice on the part of the US, UK and Australia could be expended to much greater effect elsewhere, if the aim were to improve the quality of the greatest number of lives. Instead, The US made the case before the Security Council that it knew Iraq to be in possession of prohibited chemical and biological weapons, putting it in material breach of its ceasefire obligations. This accusation needs to be proven true for the war to have any legal standing whatsoever; Colin Powell also insinuated before the Security Council that there were links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, mainly to bolster the claim that such a breach also constitutes an imminent threat. if no such proof is forthcoming, the war will still end up a fiasco.
I think itís fair to suggest that Blair and Bush know this. They are waging a pre-emptive war on the understanding that its justification will be furnished retroactively. In the coming weeks, the pressure will grow on them to deliver on this essential promise. I can easily see Rumsfeld and Bush brushing off such concerns, however. Look at the happy Iraqis, they will, say, that is reward enough, and the proscribed weapons, should they not be found, could have been smuggled to Syria, or Iran. Indeed, such notions are already being floated by the more enterprising commentators on Fox News.
For hardcore Neo-cons, like our erstwhile dean Wolfowitz, Iraq is only the beginning. Combining Iraqís intransigence vis-‡-vis the U.N. with a lowered tolerance for outlaw regimes after 9/11 into a viable casus belli required the squaring of some legal circles, and the evident strain resulted in the balking at such an endeavour by many traditional allies. But making the case for invading Iraq may prove to have been relatively easy. Doing the same thing to Syria or Iran would result in much stronger resistance. For me, the worst case scenario would be that this easy victory over Saddam emboldens the Neo-cons to go remake some more Arab countries, ones that do not have tentative cease-fire agreements with the U.N. Best case scenario: Blair gets his way with Bush and they decide to remake Palestine. It should have been at the top of the list in the first place.
The acute reader may have wondered, as I did upon rereading my own recent posts, how I could have known that the La BohËme I saw was set in Stockholm, and not, say Oslo. Two details: The presence of dˆrrvakter in front of CafÈ Momus, and the need to use a kod to get into a building.
dˆrrvakt: Bouncers wear distinctive medallions in Stockholm. They're certified, like cabbies in New York. Stockholm nightclubs have a nasty case of the velvet rope, to which Swedes, rational in every other respect (well, save a further respect or two) flock like looters to regional Ba'ath party headquarters. Bouncers do seem to play fair, though: subscribe to the dress code and you'll get in on a first come, first served basis, without regard for genetic defects or a total lack of self-esteem.
I suspect that all this standing in line is yet another altruistic gesture. It frees up places like Mosebacke and Elverket for the rest of us. New York's equivalent is the standing in line for Saturday brunch—an opportunity to pay $14 for 2 eggs and a slab of bÈarnaise on English muffins, made by the Ecuadorian busboy, instead of quaffing quiche at Le Gamin.
kod: Apartment buildings here do not have doormen. Instead they have a keypad onto to which tenants type a communal 4-digit code to gain entrance to the lobby. These codes rarely change in theory, and never change in practice. When a Stockholmer gives a party, it is considered good manners to send the code along in the email invitation. These emails get forwarded with abandon. By now, I can gain access to a decent number of choice building lobbies, should I be so inclinedAnna's code is 1812. Joachim's code is 6889..
Not to worry, though, I've been assured this is completely safe. My landlady told me she left her (now my) door unlocked all the time, as the other tenants are so "nice". No doubt, the friends of their friends are nice too. And their friends. So perhaps this is worth trying if you live in an East Village tenement: Make 30 or so copies of the key to your lobby and send them to your guests next time you have a party. Encourage your neighbors to do the same. That's not really their code, above.
Really.Let me know how it goes.
It's April, so I must be reading another Bernard Lewis Book. The first Lewis Book I read—The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 years—had proven essential background reading on my first trip to Israel and Jordan in 2000; it was anything but brief, but Bernard Lewis was one for wry understatement, I reckoned. Then came What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, What Went Wrong? still smells of an especially mellifluous SPF 50+ cream.which I read in Jamaica last year. This year, he has just come out with The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror; I picked it up instinctively at Hedengrens Hedengrens is one of the best bookstores I know; how many New York bookstores carry the entire range of the Penguin Classics?
Unlike the Republican Guard, winter is making a surprising last stand, with snow and freezing temperatures after a week of near-room temperatures.and have just read it this past weekend in a cabin on the Stockholm Archipelago.
These three books form something of a progression, and as such they deserve some comment. Each successive book is a Cliffs Notes of the preceding, it turns out. Each is about the same physical size, but the font size keeps on growing, and so they get less substantive. His latest book is positively slight, and I finished it in a matter of hours. The footnotes are shorter than those of many a SAIS paper that I wrote (and that is saying something), but I've come to suspect that this book is aimed at people who don't look up footnotes in the first place.
I'm sure he'd hate it if I suggested that at the age of 86, he's not up to something really fresh. Perhaps he'd hate it even more if I mused that he's just doing it for the money. More kindly, he probably just relented after incessant hounding from his publishers to write something explicitly in response to September 11. The problem is, Bernard Lewis is the world's pre-eminent authority on Middle Eastern Studies; he is so good that he already wrote the definitive book on the root causes of 9/11 before 9/11 happened: What Went Wrong was in page proof on September 11, 2001. What's more, Lewis turned out to be right about a great many things that he predicted way back in 1990 in a seminal series of articles in The Atlantic Monthly.
In an afterword to Crisis, Lewis writes:
The nucleus of this book was an article published in The New Yorker in November 2001. In bringing it up to date and developing it from a long article to a short book, I have adapted a few passages from previous publications, especially some articles published in Foreign Affairs and The Atlantic Monthly. The rest is new.
The internet is a blessed thing: you can read both The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly articles for free—only the Foreign Affairs articles you'd have to pay for, if you didn't already photocopy them in your local library. So how much is new?
Skimming the online offerings, I immediately recognized great chunks of what I had just read. Just one example: on page 53 of Crisis:
In 1593 an Ottoman official who also served as a chronicler of current events, Selaniki Mustafa Efendi, recorded the arrival in Istanbul of an English Ambassador. He does not appear to have been much interested in the ambassador, but he was struck by the English ship in which the ambassador traveled: "A ship as strange as this has never entered the port of Istanbul," he wrote. "It crossed 3,700 miles of sea and carried 83 guns besides other weapons . . . It was a wonder of the age the like of which has not been seen or recorded."
The 1997 Foreign Affairs article:
In 1593 an Ottoman historian, Selaniki Mustafa Efendi, recorded the arrival in Istanbul of an English ambassador. He was not very interested in the ambassador, but he was much struck by the English ship in which the ambassador traveled. "A ship as strange as this has never entered the port of Istanbul," he wrote. "It crossed 3,700 miles of sea and carried 83 guns besides other weapons . . . It was a wonder of the age the like of which has not been seen or recorded."
There is a lot more like this. Virtually every chapter starts verbatim from a previously published article. And where it does not, he distills notions that were covered amply in his more expansive books. Crisis is basically a cut-and-paste job.
This much is new, however: A rundown of quality-of-life numbers extracted from World Bank documents that seem straight out of a research assistant's to-do list. The eagerness to prove the point (that Muslim countries are poor) builds up to a bizzare comparison:
The comparative figures on the performance of Muslim countries, as reflected in these statistics, are devastating. In the listing of economies by gross domestic product, the highest ranking Muslim majority country is Turkey, with 64 million inhabitants, in twenty-third place, between Austria and and Denmark, with about 5 million each. [. . .] In a listing of industrial output, the highest ranking Muslim country is Saudi Arabia, number twenty-one, followed by Indonesia, tied with Austria and Belgium in twenty-second place, and Turkey, tied with Norway in twenty-seventh place. [. . .] In a listing by life expectancy, the first Arab state is Kuwait, in thirty-second place, following Denmark and followed by Cuba.
Leave aside for a moment that Austria has a population of over 8 million. 8,169,929 in July, 2002, according to the CIA's World Factbook "estimate".How exactly is a life expectancy similar to that of Denmark "devastating"? Surely not because Denmark is a small country? Placing 32nd out of over 180 countries One assumes 180 countries. Data is sourced only to "indicators from the United Nations, the World Bank, and other authorities."still means sitting well into the the top 20th percentile of the world.
Muslim countries may be badly off, but we know at least this much from reading Lewis's latest: Kuwaiti life expectancy is doing just fine.
So avoid Crisis. Read What Went Wrong? instead—it's a true scholarly work that focuses on the problem at hand without insulting your intelligence.
I can't let this subject go, however, without first lamenting the truly horrid subtitles being brandished by books these days. How does Holy War and Unholy Terror exactly elucidate anything, beside apprising us of some editor's unholy capacity for alliteration? Tellingly, the original subtitle for What Went Wrong? did not survive the transition from hardcover to paperback: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response became The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. Peddling clashes, are we? How about What Went Wrong? The Clash between Clarity and Sales in Publishing.
Fergus McCormick has his music website up, timed to correspond with the release of his eponymously named debut album. 
I'm mentioning it because there are some pictures of mine on there for which I have a particular affinity. They were taken one late summer, I think it was 1999, on a pier off the lower west side of Manhattan. Fergus had discovered a blue Volkswagen Karmann Ghia parked on a rooftop there, just like the one in his song, so we headed over on a lazy Sunday afternoon for some photos. Franzi came along, and inevitably she ended up being in all the shots.
Afterwards we crossed the West Side Highway to do some daytime drinking at Ear Inn. It was hot and humid outside, so we drank our gin and tonics inside and drew patterns with crayons on the paper tabletops. By the time we exited into the sweltering darkness, buzzed, New York was humming, and I remember feeling like a character from The Great Gatsby, preternaturally aware of the special moment I inhabited, and all its possibilities...
Fergus's songs are beautiful, by the way. You can listen to some of my favorites on his website, including Extremadura Love.