January 2012
1 post
Christopher Hitchens (Vanity Fair, Feb 2012)
On June 8th, 2010, I was “in conversation” with Christopher Hitchens at the 92nd Street Y in New York in front of his customary sellout audience, to launch his memoir, Hitch-22. Christopher turned in a bravura performance that night, never sharper, never funnier, and afterwards at a small, celebratory dinner the brilliance continued. A few days later he told me that it was on the morning of the Y...
September 2011
4 posts
A Globe of Heaven: the whole story
A GLOBE OF HEAVEN by Salman Rushdie
A celestial globe is a portrait not of the earth but of the skies. Globe-makers in many cultures - Persian, Mayan, Indian, European - over the centuries made many such representations of the heavens and of the pictures they saw there, working in papier-mâché, wood, brass, and sometimes in precious metals. These globes were Earth-centric, of course, and...
A Globe of Heaven, Monday Sept 19, episodes1- 3
I’m reposting the whole story so far for people who may have missed it yesterday… more during the course of the rest of the week…
A GLOBE OF HEAVEN by Salman Rushdie
A celestial globe is a portrait not of the earth but of the skies. Globe-makers in many cultures - Persian, Mayan, Indian, European - over the centuries made many such representations of the heavens and of the...
A Globe of Heaven, Sunday Sept 18, bonus episode
The American, Maria Celestis, had spent years trying to prove that aliens had landed on Earth in that barren Mexican wilderness, setting down their spaceships on landing strips in the desert whose marks could still be seen. It was a small story, and it probably wouldn’t have been printed at all if Maria Celestis at seventy had not been a woman of striking beauty, wild-haired, majestically tall and...
A Globe of Heaven, Sunday Sept 18 episode
A celestial globe is a portrait not of the earth but of the skies. Globe-makers in many cultures - Persian, Mayan, Indian, European - over the centuries made many such representations of the heavens and of the pictures they saw there, working in papier-mâché, wood, brass, and sometimes in precious metals. These globes were Earth-centric, of course, and humanist; the human view, the view from the...
