Peter Murmann

Switzerland’s Invisible Minarets By PETER STAMM Winterthur, Switzerland THREE years ago I was invited to the Tehran International Book Fair; afterward I traveled around the country. The mosques I visited were so empty as to give the impression that Iran was as secular as Western Europe.It wasn’t until I took a trip to a place of [Read More]

  Crashing a party that you are not invited to takes guts. Crashing Obama’s first state dinner takes more than nerve. Before you decide to imitate Michaele and Tareq Salahi and crash the next state dinner, wait and see what happens to the couple. DOUGLASS K. DANIEL, Associated Press Writer, reports: WASHINGTON – Crashing [Read More]

Jill Lapore reviews in the New Yorker a number of books that try to explain why the US is so violent in international comparison. Historians have shown that the murder rate in America has always been higher than in Western Europe. Why? Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, who met three years ago in a Hartford drug-treatment [Read More]

David Brooks (NT Times) files this perceptive column in the wake of President Obama’s visit in China. When European settlers first came to North America, they saw flocks of geese so big that it took them 30 minutes to all take flight and forests that seemed to stretch to infinity. They came to two conclusions: that [Read More]

  And here is a bit of the drama behind the lone Republican vote courtesy of the Washington Post A vote to make or break a career Lone House Republican supported health bill after abortion limited By Perry Bacon Jr. Monday, November 9, 2009 When Republican Anh “Joseph” Cao won a stunning victory in a heavily Democratic district in New [Read More]

In a nanosecond David lost his thumb, the one his mother painted with pine pitch when he was four to keep him from forever sucking it. Unable to distinguish human flesh the McCormick silo filler sliced it off— nail, bone, knuckle— and blew it skyward an ounce of humanity in a thousand tons of silage. Taken by surprise David suppressed the truth. Before the rush of blood he held [Read More]