Let’s Go Ride a Bike

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE - 28 FEBRUARY 2014

Last fall, I moved from Beirut to Los Angeles with my wife, Kelly, a journalist, and our 4-year-old daughter, Loretta, who one evening was ready to get back on her bike.

The sidewalk stretched out before us. We could hear the steady pulse of traffic on Lincoln and Venice Boulevards. The timing seemed perfect: just before dinner, no chill in the air — a moment to show Loretta how to enjoy her new life in America. Look, honey, you’re safe now!

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Turkey Before the Crackdown

THE NEW REPUBLIC - 5 JUNE 2013

Three years ago, I lived in Turkey, on one of the cobble-stone blocks not far from Istanbul's Taksim Square. Downstairs, at all hours, it seemed the taxis and compact cars honked, parting a crowd of sun-drenched tourists gawking at shops selling instruments and trinkets, or buying juice from the conservative guy downstairs, who I'd once seen winding up to yell at his head-scarved wife. During the day, from our balcony, I could reliably watch a dog or two scratching itself in the shade. At night, a Joni Mitchell impersonator warbled for coins, keeping me up, and I wished upon her—and all the drunken revelers, streaming from bars that would one day be closed, and all the illegal construction workers changing the city day and night—a series of incurable lung cancers or some kind of persistent laryngitis. In countries and cities all around us, there was a quiet war going on. 

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House-Hunting After the Bomb

VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW - 22 MAY 2013

Imagine my displeasure when I found myself, last November, hung-over and haggard, pushing a stroller through the security cordon at the Beirut airport. It was eight in the morning, a car bomb three weeks earlier had killed three and injured 100 in downtown Beirut, and I was in line for a flight to Istanbul, engaged in something not unlike fleeing for our lives.

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Into the Steam

AMERICAN CIRCUS - 18 FEBRUARY 2013

An attendant gave us two striped towels and we repaired to a room, where we removed everything we owned. Naked under the cloth, we followed a stooped old man, who showed us to a domed room filled with steam.

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In Istanbul, Getting to Ikea and Back

THE AMERICAN CIRCUS - 14 JANUARY 2013

It wasn't exactly a matter of life and death—procuring a high chair for my daughter from Ikea, in Istanbul—but that was the mission I found myself on one night several years ago. 

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A Life-Saving Bond Between In-Laws

THE NEW YORK TIMES - 20 NOVEMBER 2012

For her 60th birthday, my mom cooked steak, but my dad had trouble chewing and five weeks later, at 59, he was dead, and she was facing a lonely house in Miami.

“Oh, Alfie,” she said. “How am I supposed to do this without you?” She had life insurance, considerable savings and the resources to live most anywhere in the world, which was both a blessing and curse.

Where?

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I'm afraid of Virginia Woolf: On war movies, adolescence, and the 50th anniversary of Albee's masterpiece

ELECTRIC LITERATURE - 19 OCTOBER 2012

Last year, my oldest friend, Dave, was serving in the US military at a base in southern Iraq, where rockets rained down near his trailer, driving his roommate to hand-build a wall made from paving stones and water bottles around their bunk. My wife, meanwhile, had accepted a job in Baghdad, where projectiles took paths close to where she slept. In the meantime I made a home for us in Istanbul, the closest reasonable city, where I could raise our young daughter. The situation wasn’t ideal, but it’s the one we had. Alone for weeks at a time, I’d think about growing up in Florida with Dave, meeting my wife in Asia, moving to New York, then lighting out for more difficult terrain. I’d pour myself a stiff drink, wondering how we’d all gotten here: Was life at all what we may have imagined, or hoped for?

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