When you love something, you understand its good side and its bad side are two sides of the same coin. Whether your love is for a person, a place, or a thing, you have no choice but to accept that person, place, or thing in its entirety. You have to take the bad with...
I climbed past the riot police deeper into gece kondu territory. The houses at the edge of the gece kondu, the ones nearest the riot police, had tapped illegally into the city’s electrical grid, and leading from each power transformer was a rat’s nest of wires strung...
When I got to the top of the hill, I saw the police setting up barricades and pushing back a gathering crowd of onlookers. I started asking what had happened. My Turkish wasn’t very good, but I managed to latch onto and understand the word bomba. There had been a...
Late one morning in Istanbul I was walking back to my apartment in Harbiye from a teahouse in Taksim. The normal phalanx of shoeshine boys started running after me, chanting, “Shoeshine, shoeshine, shoeshine.” After a block or two of me ignoring them they gave up and...
