Although I went to college in the United States – Carleton in Northfield, Minnesota – I returned to the Middle East for a year in 1970-71 to study at the American University of Beirut.

Periodic bouts of depression. Some of these episodes were brought on by his family’s

One can’t live with a child of Holocaust survivors without absorbing some of the same sensibilities that her parents transmitted to her as a young girl. It is an unspoken dread, a sense of fragility, an anxious anticipation of unseen horrors.

I love the Middle East. My earliest childhood memories are of Jerusalem. I love the colors and smells and cadence of Arabic spoken in the streets of Cairo or Beirut. I also love the modernity and verve of Tel Aviv.

By any definition, what happened in Bhutan in the years 1989-93 was ethnic cleansing. The Bhutanese government denies this and has refused to repatriate any of those forcibly expelled.

It is one thing to be against unilateralism and against nonhumanitarian interventionism – but it is quite another thing to be against humanitarian interventionism.

The reality is that Israel is a multi-ethnic, multireligious society, and it makes no sense to insist as a precondition for peace that its neighbors recognize it as ‘the Jewish state.’

My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Bhutan is a beautiful place. High-end tourists love it.

They paid more to tap my phone than they paid me to run the Los Alamos Project.

Some of the information in those binders was even manipulated to appear more damaging to Oppenheimer.

His deepest fear was that its invention would inspire a deadly nuclear arms race between the West and the Soviet Union. To prevent this, he insisted, it was imperative that the Russians be told about the existence of the bomb project, and be assured that it was no threat to them.

Wartime compelled some mild-mannered men to contemplate what was once unthinkable.

Oppenheimer’s defeat was also a defeat for American liberalism.

How can you do both? In physics we try to tell people in such a way that they understand something that nobody knew before. In the case of poetry, it’s the exact opposite.” Flattered, Robert just laughed.

One day in class, after a particularly difficult lecture, Oppenheimer quipped, “I can make it clearer; I can’t make it simpler.”

He harshly criticized Soviet tyranny, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism.

In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him.

Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. . . . If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there.

Great wits are near to madness, closely allied and thin partitions do their bounds divide.

Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.

The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in times of preparation that determine what you do in the pinch, and that it takes an error to father a sin.

As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer’s ordeal signified that the postwar “messianic role of the scientists” was now at an end.

The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.