"One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived."

-- Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, addressing the 'graphomania' [the obsessive compulsion to write, also called scribomania] which he sees spreading through his...

The boy wears blue jeans, dark glasses and an earpiece connected to a cell phone in his pocket. He is no more than nine or ten. He leans against the side of a white UN jeep in the shade of a tall oak. Behind him, a group of younger...