Where land mines are indiscriminate, cheap, and brutal, drones are discriminate, expensive, and brutal. And yet they are insufficiently discriminate: the assassination of the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan in 2009 succeeded only on the seventeenth attempt. — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
The novelist loses, every time. Politics is insidious, the modern conduct of war (from shoulder-launched rockets to drone strikes) is insidious. Someone presses a button in California and twenty people are incinerated at a wedding in Pakistan. The killer is… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent. — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Note-taking is important to me: a week's worth of reading notes (or "thoughts I had in the shower" notes) is cumulatively more interesting than… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
It's an Obama book, certainly. I was delighted, and astonished, to hear recently that he was reading it. It's a book about a new… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“Most of the people around me yesterday were middle-aged or old. I am used to it, but it never ceases to surprise me how… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“The mind roams more widely in the dark than it does in light. It is no surprise, then, stepping out of the unlit house… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three. — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten...Generations rushed through the eye of the needle, and I, one of… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“As I contemplated the silent world before me, I thought of the many romantic ideas attached to blindness. Ideas of unusual sensitivity and genius… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
