I discovered a cool online magazine called The Weeklings. They publish one essay a day about culture, from music to movies and comics, to someone’s random musings on the Syrian Civil War. Last Thursday, those random musings were mine:

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Arab man who held a sharp razor to my throat. I hope he’s okay. 

My first trip to Syria was in 1998. I had somehow managed to convince the new director of excavations at Tell Brak that I could do all the illustrations, photography and database management he would need. We (that it so say, I) made some mistakes but we cobbled together a successful season that spring.