Qifa Nabki
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Back to the Mines
Well, I’m heading back to Cambridge tomorrow, after a wonderful year away. There will be spotty internet access for the next few days as we move into our new place, and shortly thereafter I’ll be back in the regular grind of dissertation research, conference papers, grant applications, and teaching. What this means is that blogging … Continue reading
A Reality TV Show Proposal: “Repair Lebanon”
Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in last week’s New Yorker, describes a fascinating new populist initiative called Repair California, which aims to solve that state’s governance problems (legislative gridlock, huge budget deficits, bureaucratic inefficiencies) through a citizen-sponsored constitutional convention. Here are the salient bits of the article: “California, it turns out, is ungovernable. Its public schools, once … Continue reading
Amuk in AfPak
So apparently there was an entirely inconsequential election in Afghanistan yesterday. Helena Cobban’s got a roundup of the story, and Registan has been great all week. My only contribution to the coverage is a plea for abbreviational evenhandedness. As long as people are too lazy to say or write “Afghanistan and Pakistan,” lumping them together … Continue reading
A Qnion Retraction
Dear readers: It has come to our attention that an article that we ran yesterday entitled “Hamas Courts Obama By Decapitating al-Qaida Salafists, Boils Heads in Oil” is riven with factual errors. It seems that the notorious deep fried heads and goats incident was a fabrication concocted by an unknown party (some blame Israel, others, … Continue reading
Calling all FPMers
Can someone explain Michel Aoun to me? No need for responses from the M14ers who read this blog: I know what you think of him. I’d like to hear from the FPMers. How to explain Aoun’s latest behavior, from turning down Hariri’s lunch invitation, to insisting on Gebran Bassil’s re-appointment as Telecommunications Minister (when he … Continue reading
Qifa Nabki 
And the people say…