This is a delightful surprise: A book on linguistics is reviewed in the daily New York Times. Sure, it’s David Crystal’s How Language Works, which makes it hard to ignore, but it’s still nice to see something on linguistics in the book section.
You can’t really have a bad cup of coffee in Casablanca. We’ve been to several different places since we arrived, and the espresso was amazing everywhere. Traditionally, the coffee house was the ultimate male space, where men got together to smoke, play chess, read the paper, catch up with each other and, I imagine, complain about their womenfolk. In contrast, the ultimate female space was the home, where women threw elaborate parties, listened to music, danced, traded gossip, and enjoyed a good glass of tea. But of course all of this has changed over the last ten to twenty years, and the coffee houses are being firmly and steadily desegregated. The picture above is from a Maarif cafe, which is so popular that it has been turned into a chain. At least it’s a homegrown chain. There are no Starbucks here. Yet.
The talk of the town is Faouzi Bensaïdi’s new film, WWW: What A Wonderful World, which just opened this week at the Megarama. It’s about the intersecting lives of a contract killer (played by Bensaidi himself), a policewoman, a hacker, and a prostitute, and it’s all set in Casablanca. WWW premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and was also shown a couple of weeks ago at the Marrakech Film Festival. I hope to catch it this weekend…
I’ve failed to receive several messages that were sent to my Yahoo! email account, and my attempts to get these problems straightened out have led nowhere. So if you have sent me something and have not heard back from me, it probably means I didn’t get it. Please feel free to resend.
I enjoyed Aziz Huq’s review in the American Prospect of Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam and Zachary Shore’s Breeding Bin Ladens. Huq has produced a very level-headed piece on a topic that far too often degenerates into polemics.