ARMSTRONG: Exactly, exactly. There's a running sore of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which has been festering for so long, and has become symbolic of everything that Muslims feel that is wrong with the modern world. Just as here, in the United States, fundamentalists have symbolic issues, abortion, uh, and evolution, which they can't see rationally, but they've become symbolic of ... of the evils of modernity. The state of Israel, which meant that Palestinians lost their home, has become for Muslims a symbol of their impotence in the modern world.

It wasn't always like this. At the beginning of the twentieth century, every single leading Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France. Some of them even said that the Europeans, they didn't know about America yet, that the Europeans, uh, were better Muslims than they themselves, because their modern society had enabled them to create a fairer and more just distribution of wealth, than was possible in their pre-modern climates, and that accorded more perfectly with the vision of the Quran.

Then there was the experience of colonialism under Britain and France, experiences like Suez, the Iranian revolution, Israel, and some people, not all by any means, uh, some people have allowed this ... these series of disasters to corrode into hatred. Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.

MOYERS: On a cross, crucified.

ARMSTRONG: The cross, crucified, and that turned into victory. Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength. But against the West, it's been able to make no headway, and this is as disturbing for Muslims as the discoveries of Darwin have been to some Christians. The Quran says that if you live according to the Quranic ideal, implementing justice in your society, then your society will prosper, because this is the way human beings are supposed to live. But whatever they do, they cannot seem to get Muslim history back on track, and this has led some, and only a minority, it must be said, to desperate conclusions.

MOYERS: You said once that you felt the fundamentalists were trying to restore God to the world.

ARMSTRONG: Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage.

MOYERS: They drag God back into the political world by denying democratic aspirations.

ARMSTRONG: Yes.

MOYERS: I mean, do you think democracy and fundamentalism are, uh, can co-exist?

ARMSTRONG: Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.

It must have been the last drink
that made me feel like this.
A woman looking in a store window
stood the way you do;
a man drove a truck with a child
in his lap and somehow this touched me.

I saw everything with such affection,
it had to be that last drink
that made me think of love as a relief
instead of the relief of nothing to love,
and I flirted with a waitress to celebrate
but she never came back.

The women I thought about
always had someplace to go,
and guessing where you were today
only made me drunker:
the loveliness of being held;
the quiet in which you are reading.

1. "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i. e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." - Phil Jones

Phil Jones has publicly gone on record indicating that he was using the term "trick" in the sense often used by people, as in "bag of tricks", or "a trick to solving this problem ...", or “trick of the trade”.

In referring to our 1998 Nature article, he was pointing out simply the following: our proxy record ended in 1980 (when the proxy data set we were using terminates) so, it didn't include the warming of the past two decades.

In our Nature-article we therefore also showed the post-1980 instrumental data that was then available through 1995, so that the reconstruction could be viewed in the context of recent instrumental temperatures. The separate curves for the reconstructed temperature series and for the instrumental data were clearly labeled.

The reference to "hide the decline" is referring to work that I am not directly associated with, but instead work by Keith Briffa and colleagues.

The “decline” refers to a well-known decline in the response of only a certain type of tree-ring data (high-latitude tree-ring density measurements collected by Briffa and colleagues) to temperatures after about 1960.

In their original article in Nature in 1998, Briffa and colleagues are very clear that the post-1960 data in their tree-ring dataset should not be used in reconstructing temperatures due to a problem known as the "divergence problem" where their tree-ring data decline in their response to warming temperatures after about 1960.

“Hide” was therefore a poor word choice, since the existence of this decline, and the reason not to use the post 1960 data because of it, was not only known, but was indeed the point emphasized in the original Briffa et al Nature article.

I have been known to boat
On the waters of oblivion,
Bucking for a buoyancy

I once knew as a scruff,
You and I rowing over
To the grassy bank to fuck.

You were then taking your orals
In English and I was already out
Working for a firm. Weekends

Were when we lived for then.
Now I’ve freelanced so long
I can no longer tell the days,

Except where a deadline, where money
Is involved. We didn’t stay involved.
You married for money but were soon

Back to your wilder ways, and I stayed
Single, lived in a condo, and then could
Afford an expensive loft. I live now in

A very expensive view
Where I can still see you
Still in the sway

Of our boat, in the sway of
The long grasses along the bank.
You took your ex to the cleaners,

I heard, leaving him only
With a very pressed pair
Of grass-stained trousers.

I can afford and am addicted to
Morphine now, chemically kissed,
And row that boat farther every day.

I took everything from my mother, her liquor, her ghosts,
her sweetness, her heavy lips, her breath of sorrow.
I took her waist and her spools, her ears and her thimble,
I took her green thumb, and the purple cosmos blossoms
that trembled under her kitchen window.
I took her feet and her loneliness, the cities
she lived in, the small towns, their friendless dusks,
her quilts and perfumes and fingers.
I took the sound of her dresses at midnight,
and the goat she kept as a child,
I took the crickets beneath the boards of her first houses
and her lovers; I got lost in their shadows.
I took her hatred of her father,
I ate from her dishes in rooms that smelled of the sea.
I took the war and the horses that pulled the cart
that carried her mother away.
I took the odor of crushed thyme and sweat,
I took a handkerchief embroidered by my great aunt
and the iron in her shoulders and the road signs
of old villages.
I took my mother’s maiden name and her fear of oceans,
I took her bravery and her strangeness,
I took a blessing from her and
the lullabies she whispered, drunk,
and my terror of that dark music.
I took my love for a woman
who walked through a broken doorway
with her eyes closed
following no one.

I am dating again – well, the one date, with a man who didn’t ask me any questions about myself. It ruined the pace of things. I had to maintain a constant brainstorm of conversation topics, mostly replicating material from his profile – falsified – he’d lied about his height. “What do you do for a living?”, “Where are you from originally?”, “Do you drink much coffee?” I asked, and he said optometrist, Baltimore, no, though we were in a coffee shop and he was drinking coffee, which, iced and milk-pale, had touched his breath already, that dad-smell. “I might do that at home,” I said, pointing at the glossy violet quotes stenciled on the walls of the café, letters in a dissonant overlap. I began tearing my napkin into tiny pieces. I didn’t know how to end a date properly – was thirty minutes enough? The napkin was indigo blue with “Indigo,” the name of the café, patterned over it. I tore it to separate the letters – i, n, d, i, g, … – and formed a lush pile in front of me, until he answered one of my questions with unanticipated enthusiasm, and his dad-smelling breath blew the pieces over me in a sudden napkin rain.

Afterward, I found bits of it caught in my hair. I combed them out with a slow flourish. The cat watched for a little while and then fell asleep, curled by the window like a seashell. At the sound of cars, her ears flickered in sleep, affected by the world in only this small way. At what degree of loneliness does owning a cat become a cliché? I don’t want to leave our apartment again. I’d rather stay here and do domestic things – bleach down surfaces, iron your clothing, clean the tarnished silver with a chemical reaction, boil a chicken carcass into stock. I want to research the history of the clawfoot bathtub, to discover where it got its cruel, curled feet. I want to paint the rooms, roll a creaking roller over the gray wall. That’s the part I was most looking forward to – I would have painted the back of your shirt when you weren’t looking. There wouldn’t have been any brainstorming, or any new dates with uncurious strangers, to scrape me empty like a vanilla bean. We would shut the shutters, and if an ambulance sirened violently outside, it wouldn’t be headed here.

That was my first clue there was something amiss at Google. But then other things happened; I realized I was unusual in my design orientation — I believed in user research, talking to users, designing with users in mind. While my managers and coworkers initially seemed open to this, the more I tried to bring this into the development process, the less well-received it was. The focus there seemed to be primarily on coding — how much code did you write last week? Did you write your code the way I would have written it? How well was it formatted? Of course, I realize that was just my experience in the one group I was working with, but I got the feeling that this was a widespread phenomenon — the key thing people seemed to value at Google was code, and to a lesser extent engineering architecture — but design definitely takes the back burner.

I am a very good coder, but I spend a lot more of my time and energy thinking about higher-level considerations. How would this code support users? How does it help people do things they might actually want to get done? Is it a pleasure to use? Is it intuitive for most users, not just for a small subset of users? I like to think about design and architecture and code as a system, how it all fits together to create an excellent user experience, and how one can write code which is flexible and clean, so it’s easier to modify later on. But most of all, I like to start with the user, how they would use the system, and design and architect and code with that in mind.