Culture

Love-crazed yet craving life. I worship fire./ But recant when lightning finds me out.

Omar Khayyam on New Year

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Trans. Edward Fitzgerald I. Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight: And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light. II. Dreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the Sky I […]

Books

Amos Oz, Renowned Israeli Novelist and Critic of Expansionist Right, Dies at 79

AFP

Jerusalem | AFP | – Amos Oz, who died of cancer Friday aged 79, was a celebrated Israeli novelist and passionate peace advocate whose stirring memoir “A Tale of Love and Darkness” became a worldwide bestseller. His daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger confirmed his death on Twitter, calling him “a wonderful family man, an author, a man […]

Music

How Muslim-Americans Helped Create Modern Jazz

Shalom Goldman

Art Blakey (in 1947) and and Ahmad Jamal (in 1959) traveled to North Africa to study Islam

Books

Why Kahlil Gibran is one of the Best-Selling Poets of All Time

The Conversation

By Antonia Pont | – (The Conversation) – Kahlil Gibran (original spelling at birth “Khalil”) is a strange phenomenon of 20th Century letters and publishing. After Shakespeare and the Chinese poet Laozi, Gibran’s work from 1923, The Prophet, has made him the third most-sold poet of all time. This slim volume of 26 prose poems […]

Featured

Remembering Stan Lee

Juan Cole

“There is only One in the universe who is All-Powerful, and his only weapon is . . . Love.”

Featured

Top 7 Signs Willie Nelson Might not be a Republican (That’s ‘TeaPot Party,’ not Tea Party)

Juan Cole

“Christians everywhere should be up in arms,” Nelson said about Trump border family separation policy

Brazil

Corrupt Gov’t Kept slashing Nat’l Museum, Now Brazilian History up in Smoke

AFP

Rio de Janeiro (AFP) – Brazilian officials on Monday blamed years of government cutbacks for an inferno that gutted the treasured National Museum, described by President Michel Temer as a “tragic” loss of knowledge and heritage. Even before the embers had begun to cool Monday, grief over the huge cultural loss gave way to anger […]

art and photography

From State Censorship to Western Stereotypes. Interview with Iranian Artist Maryam Palizgir

Omid Memarian

This is part of a series done by Omid Memarian for Global Voices called How globalization, identity and culture intersect in art. ( GlobalVoices.org) – Maryam Palizgir is an Iranian-born artist and designer who currently lives and works in the U.S. Her work is interdisciplinary in nature, combining two and three dimensional drawing, sculptural painting […]