I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother...

Why the U.S. academic became a Japanese citizen...

In Bad Days in Basra (2008), his memoir of the six months he spent in Iraq, Synnott recorded, in devastating detail, the chaotic reality behind the Coalition Provisional Authority's attempts to establish civic governance; the dysfunctional relationship between the two occupying powers, Britain and America; and lack of planning and support from the government back home...

Are you confused about what the Euro bailout actually is? So were we! Tom Meltzer tries to explain with the help of his animated friends...

From peaceful revolution to free elections in just nine months, the birthplace of the Arab Spring has achieved a stunning transition. Now we must embrace the victors and ensure strong roles for women, former representative Jane Harman says from Tunis...

When it comes to love, Muammar al-Qaddafi's Libya was unlucky for unmarried 33-year-old truck driver Ahmed Nori Faqiar. His looks would have benefited if his parents could ever have sprung for a dentist. Lack of means forced him to live unhappily at his childhood home well into adulthood. Marriage, a home of his own, kids -- all are dreams that the wiry Libyan had long ago steeled himself to stop hoping for...

Income inequality and the death of culture in New York City...

In financial history, Ponzi schemes—the fraudulent enterprise of paying off old investors with money collected from new ones—are the most peculiar of crimes. Before they are detected, they seem exquisitely pleasing to perpetrators and victims alike. The fraud appears to be a bountiful gift that the confidence trickster, a generous soul and a financial wizard to boot, has bestowed upon a grateful world. Investors frequently revere the schemer, endowing him with magical properties. The schemer, in turn, may come to believe that his scheme isn’t altogether shady and that he will someday generate the sensational returns advertised. For the duration of a Ponzi scheme, it may seem like a victimless crime. Not surprisingly, when the impostor is exposed, the victims experience profound hurt and disillusionment, having trusted implicitly in the schemer against a chorus of naysayers...

The discovery in British Columbia of an infectious virus that has devastated salmon farms on the East Coast, in Europe and Chile has alarmed conservationists, some of whom blame the aquaculture industry, but fishery scientists say it is too early to panic...

Earlier this month, the writer Jeff Sharlet emailed novelist Salman Rushdie to suggest a petition for writers who support Occupy Wall Street. Rushdie loved the idea. So Sharlet enlisted the help of fellow journalist Kiera Feldman, plus the assistance of literary magazines n + 1 and Tin House. The website for Occupy Writers went live on October 13. At first a petition and list of signatories, the site soon began publishing: poems by Alice Walker, prose by Francine Prose, and more...