Aziz Z. Huq

In March 1997, Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden, traveled to Afghanistan for CNN in order to interview Osama bin Laden and became one of only a handful of Western journalists to have met and spoken to the leader of al-Qaeda. Here, he talks about his […]

Your book spans a range from the myth of Orestes to the trials of Bernhard Goetz and O.J. Simpson. What changes did you observe during that long period? Trials throughout the pre-modern world were very often explicitly religious rituals. Punishments, meanwhile, treated criminals as pollutants or pests. In ancient Athens, for example, murderers supposedly emitted […]

On September 15, 2001, author Ian McEwan wrote for the Guardian a moving elegy to lives lost in the September 11 attacks by evoking the “snatched and anguished assertions of love” in final phone calls made from the hijacked planes and the World Trade Center. Nearly four years later, McEwan’s mood had changed. Writing […]