Giving Testimony

Journalist Anna Badkhen writes of her visits to an Afghan village in The World Is a Carpet: Four Season in an Afghan Village." She is trying, she says in this interview, to give a face to the people whom too many of us have seen only through the windows of military vehicles. "To stretch out on a boiled wool rug in Oqa next to a camel herder who is chatting away on his cellphone as an American F/A-18 fighter passes overhead is to lean over the rim of a temporal chasm where millennia condense and unfurl," she says. "It gives you a bit of vertigo": http://harpers.org/blog/2013/05/the-world-is-a-carpet-four-seasons-in-an-afghan-village/