Djelloul Marbrook

Hot Copy, advice to journalism students

Abandoned houses, crazy hearts

I think the world would be a better place—or at least it would be in a better place—if we knew just how crazy we are. Every one of us has an attic or a cellar full of lunacies which, if known, would make us less formidable to each other, perhaps more likeable, or at least [...]

Darfur: wallowing in our disgrace

If nightriding bushwhackers and jayhawkers were torching villages, murdering their inhabitants and raping children in Macedonia do you think the august thumbsuckers at the United Nations would whomp up the moral fortitude to intervene in force. Could the UN possibly exist for any better reason than rescuing human beings from genocide? It would seem the [...]

New ballgame or McCarthyite swill?

One of the scariest aspects of the controversy over how terror suspects should be treated is the Bush Administration’s insistence that this is a whole new ballgame the like of which the world has never seen. What hogwash! Read the history of the Inquisition in Spain. The inquisitors of the Holy(?)Office swore up and down [...]

Al-Andalus and today’s fanaticism

Poetry is alchemy. The poem is its catalyst. The poet employs algebra—the Arabic root words are al jabara, the joining—to make an elixir to catalyze words unaccustomed to each other. The elixir combines opposites to create wholes that hold ideas in suspension. The whole serves the reader a new way of experiencing things. This whole [...]

Trucking loads of class contempt

I never thought much about pickup trucks until I bought one. I bought it because we’d moved to the country from a city and found ourselves hauling big sacks and unwieldy things. Once we had one of these American icons we began to think about who drives them. After six years in the country—upstate New [...]

Listen to Saraceno

The policy of nations is to lie

The more we know about history the better we see that the foreign policies of nations are shaped less by what is right than by greed. President Bush says we are at war with Islamo-fascism. This is oil policy. The fact is there have been few periods in the histories of Christendom and Islam unplagued [...]