I have a travel story about turmoil at the famed Chelsea Hotel on guardian.co.uk.

I couldn’t have put the story together without the help of Ed Hamilton, who I first met a few years back when I wrote about the Hotel Chelsea blog. This is Ed in the 250 sq ft room he has occupied at the Chelsea for the past 13 years.

I had quite a time researching the story, popping in and out of apartments and meeting an array of characters. The resident who left the most impression, but who never made it into the story because of space, is a former singer-songwriter called Jann Paxton. Jann is very ill, suffering from cancer, he looked quite gaunt and would not allow me to take a photograph of him, hence the above picture of his dog Ginger.

Jann is among the Chelsea tenants currently threatened with eviction. As he told me, “I have nowhere to go…I wouldn’t even survive a night by myself on the streets.”

Related:
Chelsea Blues (Guardian.co.uk)
Living With Legends (Hotel Chelsea Blog)

Last night, as I scanned the list of contributors to this week’s summer fiction issue of The New Yorker, I was surprised to see the name of my upstairs neighbor Mohammed Naseehu Ali.

Not only was I proud to see that Mohammed had made it into The New Yorker (not for the first time, I might add) but I was even more impressed that he was sharing space in the same issue as Vladimir Nabokov and Haruki Murakami.

Mohammed’s short story, Mysteries of Flight, is a perfect example of his simple, engaging, and I think, elegant, style:

Since childhood, I have lived in two completely different worlds: the world of Islam and that of the Christian West. I grew up in Kumasi, Ghana. On weekdays, I attended the local Catholic primary school; weekends I spent at the madrassa, where I memorized verses from Islam’s holy book, the Koran.

The mudir, or headmaster, of the madrassa, who was also my uncle, was named Ustaz Salman. Ustaz was a man whose high intellect and theological wizardry made him somewhat imperious and impatient with the slow or dyslexic among his students. But, of all my uncle’s eccentric and belligerent characteristics, the one that stood out the most for me was his love-hate relationship with the West.

This was a man who every day read the two main English-language newspapers in the country; he also listened to the BBC news three times a day, as if the broadcasts from Bush House, London, breathed oxygen into his lungs. He often expressed admiration for Western achievements in science and technology, but he was also fond of insisting that none of the advances made by the West had ever outsmarted death. One day, I heard my uncle tell the assistant mudir that his lack of faith in the West arose from the simple fact that the white man couldn’t make electricity shock-free. In my uncle’s view, something that gives light, energy, and even life should not also harm or kill. This perceived failure alone was enough to cast doubt in Uncle’s mind over the entirety of Western civilization.

You can read the rest of the story here.

Meanwhile, if you live in London, you might want to pop along to one of Mohammed’s readings next month, when he will be in England as a finalist in this year’s £10,000 Caine Prize for African Writing.

Mohammed will be reading from his collection of short stories, The Prophet of Zongo Street, at the Royal Overseas League in London, on July 4, and at the Southbank Centre Literature Festival, on July 6.

The winner of the Caine Prize will be announced during a ceremony at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, on July 7.

• Big barbecue in New York
  I’m a sucker for barbecue. This event in Madison Square Park next weekend promises to be delicious.
  (tags: Travel Food)

• Post Buyouts Come With an Emotional Cost
  Howard Kurtz’s thoughts on 100 of his colleagues taking voluntary redundancy at the Washington Post. “After pondering the offer, I decided: I’ll badly miss the people who are leaving, but I’m staying put.”
  (tags: Media Newspapers)
• Video: Rupert Murdoch Highlight Reel, Part One
  Murdoch tells his new employees at the WSJ they will be in direct competition with the NYT within months.
  (tags: Media Newspapers Forbes400)
• Video: Rupert Murdoch Highlight Reel, Part Two
  Murdoch thinks ‘rock star’ Obama is “fantastic” and admits to playing a role in NY Post endorsement.
  (tags: Media Politics Forbes400)

Sorry for the pause. I’ve been in the Adirondacks for a few days. While I was away there was a brilliant story in the New York Times about Harvard neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who experienced what she describes as nirvana after suffering a stroke eight years ago.

Within minutes, her left lobe — the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context — began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great.

The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries — about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job — untethered themselves from her and slid away.

Her perceptions changed, too. She could see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy.

“My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air,” she has written in her memoir, “My Stroke of Insight,” which was just published by Viking.

After experiencing intense pain, she said, her body disconnected from her mind. “I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle,” she wrote in her book. “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.”

There’s an incredible video of Jill describing her experience at a TED conference earlier this year. It’s eighteen minutes long. If you can find the time to watch it, I guarantee it will be one of the most interesting things you see this year. (The embedded video seems to take a while to load. If you want to watch it instantly click here.)

Related:
A Superhighway to Bliss (NYT)
My Stroke of Insight (TED video of Jill Bolte Taylor)

• Police Are Out in Force as a Neighborhood Simmers With Tension Again
  Tension mounts between Hasidic and Black communities in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, scene of riots in 1991.
  (tags: Brooklyn Crown-Heights)
• Man jumps over Grand Canyon
  Amazing photos of a man, apparently drunk, rock-hopping over a ravine at the Grand Canyon
  (tags: Travel Stupidity)

Thanks to Jenna for sending this British comedy sketch “Facebook in Reality.”

Does Lou Dobbs have the whitest teeth in television? This YouTube video really doesn’t do his mouth justice. Today, on the HDTVs at the gym his teeth looked whiter than the stripes of the flag flapping patriotically in the background. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Perhaps it’s a ploy to distract from the bile coming out of his mouth?

UPDATE: A tipster writes, “Dobbs not only had his teeth whitened for HDTV, but also went through a lot of painful orthodontia work. [Rumor is, he has been] complaining about having to have all the work done for the new fancy screens.”

Related
Yellow teeth Lou Dobbs billing Chimpys speech tonight as very important (Democraticunderground.com 2006)
What is happening to Lou Dobbs and Chris Matthews? (Democraticunderground.com 2007)
Lou Dobbs’s Smile (Early-retirement.org, 2007)