Sometimes You Put Your Foot in the Sink. Sometimes You Put Your Foot in Your Mouth.
In either instance, it's better when it's not a crowded interstate rest stop.
This post was supposed to be just an apology, or at least an explanation. But then I thought: Wouldn’t it be lame to leave you with just and only the reasons why I’ll be posting sporadically over the next several weeks? The least I could do was share at least one misadventure in stepparenting, to soften the blow, and remind us all that, when we don’t keep ourselves humble, God lends a helping hand.
Common Sense, As My Dad Used to Say, is Not So Common
On the morning drive back from Sunday school, R was, as is his habit, sharing facts, news, trivia, and other insights into any professional sport. When we turned past the Chick-Fil-A and were halfway home, he started telling me about the several sets of siblings who play in the NFL. I was tired, you see, and worn out from lack of sleep and a workout that went too far, and could hardly keep up.
But, of course, you can’t say that. At one point, he began to tell me about two brothers who played in the NFL.
“Oh,” I said, trying to sound alert. “Are they twins?”
”No,” he said, “they were born a month apart.”
Then I was suddenly awake. What the heck was he talking about? It didn’t occur to me, probably because (a) I was tired and (b) I’m slow on the uptake that they might’ve been step-siblings. (The ironies.) Also, without thinking remotely ahead, I interjected, “That’s not possible. You can’t be born a month after your sibling.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Why not?”
At which point, bless my heart and hope to die of mortification, it occurred to me that he had no idea where babies come from, how they develop, what gestation is, or basically anything to do with the human reproductive process. Babies just show up. Somehow, I prefer his thinking that way. At least for now and the next fifteen years.
To my partial credit, I was able to deflect, changing the topic to when their actual birthdays were, at which point, so far as I could tell, he’d of course misspoken—there was no miraculous suspension of basic science here—and they were Irish twins. Then we went home and watched the Bengals shock the Chiefs.
Disappearing Act
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting much less regularly. That’s disappointing (hopefully for you as much as it is for me). But the reasons why are rather exciting and worth sharing.
I’ll be busy all of next week recording the audiobook for Two Billion Caliphs, which is fun, terrifying, and a blessing.
Then, in the weeks after, I’ll be traveling with the wife for a badly overdue, short little vacation, and thereafter for a possible speaking gig and workshop, although nothing’s finalized, and I’m not even sure if it’ll be open to the public. (My guess is it won’t be, but if that isn’t true, and the program comes together, I’ll definitely let you know.)
March will be quiet, or at least quieter, God willing, and then April—Ramadan, the release of Two Billion Caliphs, a book tour of some kind.
Thank you for understanding—and, in case you’re in the broad midsection of our great country, about to get walloped by a supposedly supersized winter storm, please stay safe, stay warm, check in on your loved ones, and stay off the road to whatever extent you can.
P.S. Articles Good. Books Better.
There’s about forty or fifty books on my bedside table, only one of which is in the process of being read. There are also just as many magazines.
I’m ashamed to say, but not ashamed enough not to broadcast it, that those range from The New Yorker to Men’s Health, National Geographic Traveler, and Car & Driver. Not everything has to be so serious, okay?1
Talk of snow days and upcoming travel has me reflecting on how much time I’ll have to read (traditionally, digitally, aurally). And what’s the good in reading if you’re not also sharing? Note also: Sometimes I share before I actually (or ever) read. In this specific instance, hopefully not the latter, but yes on the former.
Take that, common sense.
Talab al-‘Ilm
I haven’t read it yet, but fairly agnostic academic Ilana Horwitz’s God, Grades, Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Effects on Academic Success looks to be worth a serious dive (with potentially counterintuitive if intriguing conclusions.)2 If you’ve got an overachieving young adult in your faithful household, this might pique their curiosity:
…among her findings is that devoutly religious high school students are about 10 percent more likely to earn A’s than other students, “which is statistically quite substantial,” she notes. They are about 40% more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree. And they are not few in number; Horwitz estimates that about one in four students in American schools are “abiders” as she calls them – i.e. religiously devout, who orient their everyday lives around their faith.
Buy the book here. (Bookshop.com helps support independent booksellers.)
I also haven’t read it yet, but London School of Economics Professor Lea Ypi has a new book out, Free: Coming of Age At the End of History, that’s philosophy, political commentary, and memoir rolled into one nice, neat, and neatly-published package; I’m fascinated by this kind of exploration into history, governance, and identity, but even more so when it’s written accessibly. After all, I’m easily bored, and anyway too busy at this point of my life to slog through obtuse prose.
The book focuses on her native Albania as its setting, theme, and concern:
With the the statues of Stalin and Hoxha were topple, almost overnight, people could vote and worship freely, and invest in hopes of striking it rich. But factories shut, jobs disappeared, and thousands fled to Italy, only to be sent back. Pyramid schemes bankrupted the country, leading to violence. One generation’s dreams became another’s disillusionment. As her own family’s secrets were revealed, Ypi found herself questioning what “freedom” really means. With acute insight and wit, Ypi traces the perils of ideology, and what people need to flourish.
The New York Times enthusiastically recommended it:
Ypi’s memoir about growing up during Albania’s transition from totalitarian communism to liberal capitalism is the story of a childhood cleaved, sometimes violently, into before and after. In December 1990, after days of demonstrations, the dictatorship fell, and nearly overnight her world transformed: Her parents told her that they had never supported the party, that the family history she knew was a lie, that the end point of human freedom did not have to be communism. As she archly puts it: “Things were one way, and then they were another. I was someone, then I became someone else.” OK, I thought, that is what it feels like to live through a rupture in history.
This was just one of the many revelations I had while reading “Free.” The book is packed with insights, on family as much as on politics. Ypi is a beautiful writer and a serious political thinker, and in just a couple hundred readable pages, she takes turns between being bitingly, if darkly, funny (she skewers Stalinism and the World Bank with equal deadpan) and truly profound (she tries to answer the question “What is freedom?”).
Buy the book here.
And, of course, I also haven’t read it yet, but Yale Professor Dr. Jing Tsu’s Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern talks about how, in order to become the rising superpower that it is today, China had to modernize its language. I am (this time actually and not flippantly) ashamed to say I know next to nothing about a huge country, culture, and civilization that shapes so much of our modern world, and looks destined to become even more impactful in years to come.
One of the central characters? A Muslim poet! Considering the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of many, and genocide of a subset of, its Muslims—part of a larger, militant hostility to difference common to dictatorships—this was a curious and provocative tidbit, making me want to know more.
She doesn’t know it yet, but I’m going to suggest to F that we read this book together:
After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology.
Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today.
Buy the book here. And expect more recommendations too.
For I want these kids to learn about Islam, yes.
But I also want them to love to learn, and challenge them to learn beyond assumed boundaries. I majored in Philosophy and Middle Eastern Studies at NYU; at Columbia, I did my Master’s in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. That’s all well and good. All the same, one of my favorite life experiences was a class I took on Czech literature while an undergrad, which was totally outside of anything I knew, understood, or knew and understood how to appreciate.
It was my final semester, and made me wonder: What if I’d studied more of this?
What if I’d learned Czech instead of, say, Persian? Not that there’s anything wrong with Persian, at all, but why did my heritage define my education, and not, instead, a confident embrace of the whole world? Maybe that’s inevitable for kids of my generation, the offspring of alienated immigrants, but F, and Z and R, don’t have that baggage, and should they not be empowered to ignore such encumbrances? Why does some knowledge only belong to some kinds of people?
Though it’s hard to cultivate in a time of extreme pressures on our time, academically, physically, socially, and all the other difficulties of being an adolescent in the 2020s, how much time do we really get in our lives to just learn? And if we don’t push ourselves to learn beyond what we know, or find easy, how do we ever discover what we might be passionate about, or what we might be very good at? “The seeking of knowledge is incumbent on every Muslim, man or woman.”
Or “seek knowledge, even unto China,” except—sorry—that’s not an authentic Hadith. But hey, sometimes it’s the spirit, not the substance.
You Say Kiev, I Say Kyiv
I think this post is about long enough. In fact, the tornado sirens are going off in the near distance. Every first Wednesday of the month at 12p.m. sharp. When I first moved here, I did not know this. Naturally, I assumed the loud, persistent wailing was an air raid siren, we were under sustained attack by an enemy that had reached the Midwest, for which reason it seemed obvious the coasts were long since lost, the capital had fallen, and
How old are some of these magazines? Suffice it to say, National Geographic Traveler has not been published in The Land of the Free since 2019.
No, it’s not materially relevant to the quality of her scholarship whether she’s a person of faith or not. But some people sometimes assume that there is absolutely no such thing as a serious attempt at objectivity and that, as such, a person’s own beliefs cannot help but intrude on their assumptions and conclusions.
To a degree, sure, but that’s why we have fact-checkers, editors, and peer review.