You must’ve have heard the news that five Philadelphia-area Muslim men were just convicted of conspiring to massacre soldiers at Fort Dix. AP reports “Convicted were: Shnewer, a Jordanian-born cab driver; Turkish-born convenience store clerk Serdar Tatar; and brothers Dritan, Eljvir and Shain Duka, ethnic Albanians from the former Yugoslavia, who had a roofing business. A sixth man arrested and charged only with gun offenses pleaded guilty earlier.”
According to folks defending the men, they were just playin.’ If the information from the trial is correct, however the men were indeed plotting something nefarious and the folks defending them are blind apologists. Continue reading
As 2008 comes to an end, I can’t help but be haunted by three young men whose deaths have impacted my life this year. These three men died terrible deaths in 2008. One, a young immigrant boy, reminds me of my own immigrant family. The ever-present quest for the American dream. The other, a soon-to-be teacher brings to mind my post-undergrad years. The fears, hopes and doubts of that time in life. And the last, a boy struggling with severe depression, whose story seems so familiar, I look away every time I see his picture. 
Think about becoming a 
Faced with a worsening deficit, the venerable, research-driven University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaelogy and Anthropology is seeking to reinvent itself as an updated “tourist magnet.” As an initial step, the director has laid off 18 researchers, though some may stay if grant money can be found to cover their salaries. 
Not 
It started at the Ivy League level. So my high school friend at Harvard asked me to be his friend. Naturally I said yes. (How can a Harvard friend lead you wrong?) And before I knew it, I had 300+ Temple classmates who were ‘facebook friends,’ and hundreds more from high school. No problem. We all shared (relatively) the same taste for poking, posting updates and posing for scandalous pictures. Facebook was privy to fond college memories, triumphs and extreme failures. It helped me get my homework done. Learn about jobs. Interview men. It made my world inexorably smaller and easier to navigate. That was college.
