Envy Apartment

Seventy years ago this month, my grandfather fled India to join millions of refugees in a new country to be known as Pakistan. He survived the ordeal across the still-unmarked border, but he lost family and friends in the killings, expulsions and unimaginable acts of vengeance that accompanied the making of India and Pakistan. These episodes still haunt the subcontinent. My grandfather died four decades later at his home in Lahore. He never returned to his village 20 miles away in what became a different country. I thought often about his journey as I packed up two years of life in Delhi in preparation for my own, very different, Indian departure. My partner’s job had brought us there, and we returned to Washington this month. But despite the privilege of my U.S. passport, I lived in Delhi with the painful echoes of my grandfather’s partition. For almost two years, I lived as a Pakistani-born Muslim in Narendra Modi ’s Hindu- nationalist India . I knew that the experience would be dis...

There are probably many people who don't remember that OJ Simpson was found liable for murder back in 1997. With all the Hollywood weirdness of the earlier criminal trial in which he was declared innocent, there was another civil trial by jury that determined he was liable for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. One juror claimed after hearing Simpson 's testimony that “he was not credible,” and another said that “ finding OJ Simpson liable of the murders and acting with oppression and malice was one of the easiest decisions I have ever had to make.”  When The Juice made headlines recently with the news that he would be released from prison after serving nine years for armed robbery, I pulled up this old photo of him with the man who currently lives in the White House and immediately thought of this song. That there is Tom Brumley playing pedal steel guitar , and he was in the Buckaroos throughout much of the '60s and then eventually joined Ricky Nelson ...