“Photographs obtained by The Independent reveal how workers with drills and mechanical diggers have started demolishing some Ottoman and Abbasid sections on the eastern side of the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca. … One column which is believed to have been ripped down is supposed to mark the spot where Muslims believe Muhammad began his heavenly journey on a winged horse.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Why Are Saudi Arabia’s Theocrats Allowing Mecca’s Historic Sites To Be Destroyed?
In fact, they’re not just allowing it; they’re encouraging it. And it’s basically for the same reason that extremists destroyed historic shrines in Timbuktu.
Heaven’s Gate – After 33 Years, Does It Make Sense?
Manohla Dargis: “Watching Heaven’s Gate for the first time in February I understood how it could mean so many seemingly contradictory things to so many people and why so many dissimilar conclusions could all feel true.”
FBI Says It Knows Who Committed Gardner Museum Thefts
“In a stunning twist in a case that had frustrated investigators for decades, federal law enforcement officials said today that they had identified the people who stole $500 million worth of masterworks in a daring heist from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990.”
Are We Born Believing In God?
“In conversation with Muslims and Hindus I have been told that children come into the world already knowing God. This theme that children have special access to the divine appears in various traditions, but independent of theological claims, do we have reason to believe that we are born believers in God?”
Which Came First, The Pedestrian Or The Liberal?
“Could it be that those who chiefly experience the world around them by car simply don’t think the same as those who get around by foot? In other words, do sidewalks actually produce Democrats?”
Can Computers Fill The Role Of Choreographers?
“Now we’re getting at more complicated questions about how we relate to the digital world, about the balance of power between our machines and us. In fact, the tensions that drive science fiction are no longer theoretical – they’re real, at least on the experimental margins of the dance world.”
Girls As Geopolitical Allegory
“The central journey in Girls is how immature people fumble their way toward maturity. The parallels to world politics here are surprisingly strong – after all, sovereign states are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history, so national polities also possess some immaturity.”
Do Today’s Opera Singers Have Bad Attitudes?
Critic Peter Conrad and opera singer Christopher Gillett have it out.
‘The Houdini Of History’ – Vladimir Nabokov, Escape Artist
“In 1919, he and his immediate family fled revolutionary Russia on the last ship out of Sevastopol, a vessel aptly named Nadezhda(‘Hope’). In 1937 he escaped Hitler’s Germany by fleeing to France, and in 1940, just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis, he boarded a French ocean liner’s last voyage to New York with his Jewish wife and son.”