Global Muse

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievance s. — The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution I remember almost every room in Carroll Hall, the home of the  School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . I remember nearly every professor who taught us about "good", ethical journalism. Chuck Stone, with his slow and steady speech, his warm and jovial manner, transferred his wisdom while simultaneously questioning censorship; Rich Beckman, with the simplest of instructions, gifted us with the minimalist approach to photojournalism and photo editing, ensuring all we did with our cameras and our computers as journalists was honest; Jay Anthony transmitted to us the rules of design and the tools wit...

"Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room." ~Harriet Beecher Stowe I don't know where home is anymore. Supposedly, I am here now. But I occasionally think, with absurd ambivalence, that I want to go home. And when I think I want to go home - for that tumultuous, turgid fifteen or thirty minutes or sixty minutes- I mean my latest home, and that is in Dubai. It's hard for me to say where "home" is. Now, it is in Dubai - or at least I have referred to Dubai as home since December, when I felt it was time to make an exit from the cacophonous subcontinent back to the desert. Yet, as summer holiday approached I began to think about coming home - to the United States and more specifically North Carolina. I lived in North Carolina for ten years, my entire adult life until I left for Dubai, and prior to that Ohio , Pennsylvania, and Indiana, respectively. While...