daily prompt | The Gad About Town

Raif Badawi Matters

Posted on July 30, 2016 by Mark Aldrich

Who is Raif Badawi?

What follows is an up-to-date list of the articles and columns I have written concerning Raif Badawi. Each one was first published here, in The Gad About Town website; several were subsequently linked to and quoted in other media outlets, including the Raif Badawi Foundation’s website itself. (I am not an impartial reporter, so it was an honor to see my work there.)

The photo-quote at the top is one I created in August 2015.

Who is Raif Badawi? Badawi is a writer from Saudi Arabia who started a blog entitled “Saudi Arabian Liberals,” then was arrested in 2012 and charged with “insulting Islam” and with apostasy for his writings. In Saudi Arabia and many countries, apostasy, the abandonment of a belief—in this case, belief in Islam—is as grave an offense as murder. A conviction on either charge, apostasy or murder, will lead to the same result: state-ordained capital execution. In Saudi Arabia, execution is conducted by beheading in a public square.
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Gone with the …

Posted on July 29, 2016 by Mark Aldrich

Crisis Mismanagement

Posted on July 27, 2016 by Mark Aldrich

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

* * * *
“Take my advice—I’m not using it.” I can tell you to keep calm. At my worst, I might insist that you keep calm. But as someone who can introduce stress into the least stressful, sweetly innocuous, and even some of the more pleasant experiences in life, when I am confronted with the parts of life that others find truly stressful, I hunker down and find the effort deep inside myself to make them yet more stressful.

In one of my lesser achievements in the field of stress management, I gave myself a black eye while tying my shoes. These were boots with leather laces (I am not a cowboy) and such laces can take a little effort to yank into position. While securing my “half-knot” on my right shoe, the length of lace in my left hand broke and I clocked myself in the right eye. At the time, I was 34 years old, not 11.
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