Tamim Ansary reads a short story that addresses the theme The Lesser Evil. This is part of San Francisco’s fabulous week-long annual Liquake Festival which begins on October 6 and ends a week later with the Litcrawl–dont miss any of it; go to www.litquake.org for details.  

Thursday, October 11, 7 pm
Varnish Fine Art
77 Natoma Street (at 2nd Street)
(FREE–but you must be 21 or over)

This year, in addition to all the usual New Years resolutions–lose weight, use less crack, etc.–I decided to add “Be nice.”   
Well, on paper I’ve been losing weight, if you turn the paper upside down. And using less crack has been hard ‘cuz I didn’t use any to begin with (but it’s such terrible stuff, zero doesn’t seem like enough: less than zero would be better.) But the hardest resolution to keep has been “Be nice.” (Or to put it in the long form “Don’t take it out on anyone whose fault it isn’t.”)

When I told my daughter Elina I was going to write a little something about the difficulties of being nice, she said, Read more

Five years ago, America had a rare opportunity in Afghanistan. It stood astride a country exhausted by chaos, tired of bloodshed, and hungry for peace. At that moment, having driven the Taliban out of Kabul, the United States could have relied on the Afghan people as allies. At that moment, Afghans themselves would have manned the barricades against saboteurs and terrorists to protect Americans helping to rebuild their country. Liberated from security concerns, the United States could have exercised to the utmost its undoubted genius for creating prosperity. The military victory could have been a platform for starting on America’s real work: putting a devastated Muslim country back on its feet with no strings attached—just think how that news would have rippled beyond the borders of Afghanistan and throughout the Islamic world.

Instead, the Bush Administration committed an astonishing Read more