The Fine African Hand

There are only two feature films that reflect negatively on Somalis: Black Hawk Down and Captain Phillips.  The former deals with the U.S. involvement in a Somalia civil war (1992), the latter about Somali pirates hijacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea in...

“CHRISTMAS TIME/IS HERE…”

It happened just last week: A few days before Thanksgiving, I was in a department store, looking for some early Christmas gift items, when I suddenly thought: “It doesn’t feel like Christmas yet.” And it didn’t. Temperatures in Chicago were...

Classical, Some Day

The founding mission of the Italic Institute in 1987 was to restore a classical perspective to the Italian heritage.  To that end we used Italic in our corporate documents.  Italic was directly from the Latin Italicus, the name of an inhabitant of ancient...

A Missing History

Filmmaker Ken Burns has contributed a body of work documenting the great American experiment, some 40 films, offered free to the American people via PBS.  He has educated viewers on subjects as diverse as the history of the Brooklyn Bridge to the Vietnam War. His...

The First Digs

There’s been much media coverage of the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo this month.  The billion-dollar colossus houses the largest collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts ever assembled including all of King Tut’s burial treasures. Giovanni...

Telling the Whole Story

The election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York is a giant step for South Asians and Muslims in America.  It is also a victory for Socialism, that failed economic system that has seduced generations of dreamers since Karl Marx. The promise of Socialism is to...