Letter from Pakistan: Days of Rage

"In the white glare of a hot summer’s noon, the broad avenues of Islamabad, Pakistan’s modern capital, are usually empty. But on a sweltering day this May the streets were crowded with noisily chanting protesters, all of them demonstrating against the military government of President Pervez Musharraf. Three separate protests were under way. Each one represented a slightly different vision of the future that Pakistan might have if—as now seems more likely than ever—Musharraf’s government were to fall."

by William Dalrymple

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I was Michel Foucault's love slave

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by theory, well-fed complacent leather-coated, dragging themselves through the Caucasian campuses at dawn looking for an angry signifier."

by Carol Lloyd

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Good People

They were up on a picnic table at that park by the lake, by the edge of the lake, with part of a downed tree in the shallows half hidden by the bank. Lane A. Dean, Jr., and his girlfriend, both in bluejeans and button-up shirts. They sat up on the table’s top portion and had their shoes on the bench part that people sat on to picnic or fellowship together in carefree times. They’d gone to different high schools but the same junior college, where they had met in campus ministries. It was springtime, and the park’s grass was very green and the air suffused with honeysuckle and lilacs both, which was almost too much. There were bees, and the angle of the sun made the water of the shallows look dark. There had been more storms that week, with some downed trees and the sound of chainsaws all up and down his parents’ street. Their postures on the picnic table were both the same forward kind with their shoulders rounded and elbows on their knees. In this position the girl rocked slightly and once put her face in her hands, but she was not crying. Lane was very still and immobile and looking past the bank at the downed tree in the shallows and its ball of exposed roots going all directions and the tree’s cloud of branches all half in the water. The only other individual nearby was a dozen spaced tables away, by himself, standing upright. Looking at the torn-up hole in the ground there where the tree had gone over. It was still early yet and all the shadows wheeling right and shortening. The girl wore a thin old checked cotton shirt with pearl-colored snaps with the long sleeves down and always smelled very good and clean, like someone you could trust and care about even if you weren’t in love.

By David Foster Wallace

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See also: Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway

Go ask Alice

Are Alice Waters' gastronomic principles -- shop locally, eat organically -- too hard to live by? A frank talk with the renowned guru of fresh food.

I had been prepared to skewer Alice Waters. Though I have eaten some of the best food I've ever encountered at her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, and though I have generally tried to live by the gastronomic principles that she's become famous championing, and though I believe that the world would be better off in nearly every way if more people listened to her, there is a limit to what can be expected of us -- of me! -- and I wanted to tell her, Alice Waters, you just want too much.

by Farhad Manjoo

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Maturity Was Just Too Messy for Me

"The details of the relationship were as follows: I was 24, saddled with a boring job at a giant food products company outside of Chicago, living at my family's home in an upscale suburb north of the city, saving money for the down payment on a condominium that I would never come to buy. She was 41, a former lawyer, divorced and the mother of three young children, a boy and two girls. As it turned out, she also happened to live in the same suburb as my family, less than five minutes from my home.

We met in an evening class at Northwestern. I knew little about her before asking her out, only that she had terrific black hair and that we'd gone to the same university, though she made it clear when it came up in conversation that she had gone there many, many years before I had.

I knew, too, that there was a sexual résumé I was hoping to build; I had been with the same girlfriend from high school through college and had little experience otherwise.

Several weeks into the course, I sent this woman an e-mail message (I had found her address on the class list), asking her straight out if she would like to have a drink with me.

She didn't respond."

By Peter Levine

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