DAMASCUS, Syria — While in Aleppo I had the pleasure to meet Syria’s “shadow tourism minister” a 24-year-old university student named Hassan.While the Syrian government fails to counter the Bush administration’s characterization of a rogue state terrorist training ground and other nonsense, Mr. Hassan spends hours on the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree chat board extolling […]

One evening, after a hard day’s toil in the vineyards of Southern Illinois, I got an email from old friend about a conference being assembled in Lebanon. The idea was to bring together six American and six Middle Eastern journalists for a week and set ’em loose on one another. Or something like that. All […]