Banning the Fez. One of the hottest issues in contemporary Turkish politics involves the question of whether Islamic dress (in particular, women's head scarves) should be allowed to be worn in public buildings. It seems a bit strange that something as apparently personal as a head covering would be causing such an uproar in a western-styled democracy. But headgear figures prominently in modern Turkish history and national identity -- witness the Turkish government's own account of the matter, a bracing read entitled "Hat Reform and the Revolution in Dress".

Reading the unreadable. "In 1864, the French lay missionary Eugène Eyraud -- the first known non-Polynesian resident of Earth's most isolated inhabited island, Easter Island -- reported in a letter to his superior that he had seen there 'in all the houses' hundreds of tablets and staffs incised with thousands of hieroglyphic figures..." In the world of alphabets and writing systems, there are only a few big unsolved mysteries. There's Etruscan, some varieties of ancient Persian, the Mayan glyphs, and (leave it to Easter Island), the 'Talking boards', semi-translated and related to just about nothing else, at least if you discount rumors of a connection with the also-undeciphered writing of the Indus valley civilizations, 4000 years previous and half a world a way. Welcome to the world of rongorongo.

Teaching old masters new tricks. In the late 1990s the British artist David Hockney started theorizing that many 16th-18th century painters worked with the aid of various optical devices -- lenses, mirrors, camera obscuras, etc. The evidence supporting this theory came not from the usual, historical sources (studio inventories, accounts left by portrait-sitters) but rather from the paintings themselves, which exhibited, according to Hockney, a measurable "optical look". The New Yorker ran Lawrence Weschler's account of Hockney's early theories with the provocative (and unapproved by author or artist) title, "Did the Old Masters Cheat?". Needless to say, hackles were raised -- here was a man challenging a central belief of art historians, using methods foreign to the field (i.e., a mix of artistic hunches and experimental physics). A couple of years later, Hockney had refined his theories enough to merit a second, illustrated Weschler profile, a book (Secret Knowledge), and even a conference ("Art and Optics" -- several of the featured panelests can be heard in this radio program). It's all very fascinating, though one gets the feeling that the theory makes most sense when Hockney and his allies are explaining it. I'm sure Newton sometimes had the same problem.

Unchained melodies. "Do you delete the letter Q from the alphabet just because you don't use it as much as the others?" So said Folkways Records founder Moses Asch when critics asked him why he never trimmed his company's catalog of thousands of records, even though some of them had sold only a few hundred copies. When Asch died in 1986, he left his company and collection to the Smithsonian Institutation, with the stipulation that every recording -- from Woody Guthrie to "Music from Southern New Guinea" to "Polish Concentration Camp Songs" to recordings of sounds made by frogs, office equipment and even the Ionosphere -- all of them would remain in print, in perpetuity. And so they are, available on tape and CD from Smithsonian/Folkways Records. That the twentieth century spawned and prospered one such musical visionary is already cause to wonder. And we haven't even mentioned Alan Lomax. . . .

Let each man do his patriotic ditty. Musical fame was Jimmie Davis's ticket to the Louisiana governorship, and Sonny Bono's fast track to the U.S. House of Representatives. But what happens when the tables are turned, when political office becomes the launch-pad for a songwriter's career, rather than vice-versa? Listen no further than the oeuvres of Senator Orrin Hatch and, somewhat more painfully, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft -- "You Are My Sunshine" it ain't.

Fourteen ninety something. I used to think the term pre-Colombian art meant objects produced in South America before 1819, the year Colombia, led by Simon Bolivar, won its independence from Spain. It always seemed an arbitrary division. But the term and its associated date, of course, refer not to the nation but to the man for which it was named: Christopher Columbus, 1492. After reaching a zenith of mythic figuredom at the end of the 19th century, Columbus has, unsurprisingly, taken a dive in the past few decades. These days, just about everyone agrees that the great navigator was a bit clueless -- he died, after all, thinking he'd discovered Asia -- and that his arrival and its aftermath made life much worse for the "Indians" he found. What's surprising, at least to me, is both how wrong he seems to have been, and how good the locals likely had it before his ships arrived.

The cult of Jon Frum. "Prayers and flowers are offered at the red cross in the village church. This is followed by a flag-raising ceremony and a military parade. Islanders carry rifles made of bamboo ... About 100 men march under the command of two village elders dressed as US Army sergeants. The soldiers have the letters 'USA' painted in red on their bodies." The South Pacific nation of Vanuatu is home to a religious tradition centering around an American king who promised, one day, to return to the island with a white ship full of gifts. The more you think about it, though, the Jon Frum legends seem less strange and exotic than just plain familiar. Consider these words, from the poet Robert Bly (author of Iron John, but that's coincidental): "The Mall of America in Minneapolis is the largest mall in the world, and it has a statue of Snoopy taller than any statue of Christ in Minneapolis. If we replaced Snoopy with a statue of [the Hindu goddess] Kali, with her fangs, her bloody cleaver, her necklace of skulls, her long tongue hanging out, we would see the true face of mall culture. Everyone who saw it would be a tiny bit more adult. They might notice also that our abundance implies insatiable hunger elsewhere in the world."

So many stories. The young Robert Louis Stevenson said he always carried two books -- one to read from, the other to write in. His literary intake (from those books, from the world) and output (750,000 published words) were equally stunning, especially for a man who spent much of his life as an invalid. Born in Scotland, where his father held the job title of 'Keeper of the Northern Lights', Stevenson died at 44 on his plantation in Samoa. And in between: writing, writing, adventure, writing, and more writing: Dr Jeckyl and Mr Hyde and Treasure Island, sure, but also lesser known gems like Travels with a Donkey in the Cevannes, a charming tale of man, beast, and revolutionary fur-lined "sleeping-sack".

Autumnal equinox. The days and nights are, for the briefest moment, equally long, everywhere on earth. Here in the north, fall is upon us -- good news or not, depending on whether one's poetic sensibility favors William Blake or Robert Frost. Either way, it's a time of year to pause and take stock of a now-completed harvest of stunningly intericate crop circles, or maybe just ponder the chemistry of all those autumn colors. Equations, anyone?

Witness. "I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: / To glorify things just because they are." Few writers can convincingly refer to the last hundred years as my century. Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish-Lithuanian poet, is one of them. A survivor of the Bolshevik revolution, the Nazi occupation and Warsaw uprising, of Paris and Berkeley in the 1960s, and of exile upon exile upon exile, Milosz balances strident criticism of the grand philosophies of his (and our) era and equally incisive dissections of his own motives with a fierce, if reluctant, commitment to beauty, to humanity, and to God. The results, in poetry or prose, are stunning. For an excellent audio overview -- the life and work of Milosz in his own and his fellow poets' words -- head here.

Foreign relations. "Of all nations in the world, America is the most interesting to the Chinese." So begins the 1914 book of observations and anecdotes of Wu Tingfang, who spent years as the China's minister to the United States and adjacent countries. America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat is alternately amusing, insightful, and perplexing -- one moment finds Wu detailing the U.S. government's harshly discriminatory treatment of Chinese immigrants; a page or two later, he'll be marshalling an intricate argument as to why it would be in America's best interest to title their chief executive "Emperor" rather than "President". The fact that Wu offers an outsider's perspective of a bygone era makes his book, cheerfully digitalized by the good folks at Project Gutenberg, most interesting indeed.

What have you done for me, philately? One of the privileges of nationhood is that, no matter how tiny, war-torn, or politically insignificant your country might be, it has the ability to issue legal-tender postal stamps -- not so much for the mailing needs of the locals as for the worldwide community of stamp collectors, who will pay for anything colorful, rare, or otherwise of interest. Thus for some nations, stamp designs veer from the traditional topics (national events and icons, local flora and fauna) into less relevant, though more profitable, themes. Angola has issued stamps celebrating the United States Space Shuttle; Liberia chimes in "Achievements in Outer Space" and, in an even more mind-wrenching non sequitur, a stamp honoring the first Chinese NBA player; and in 1997, just in time for the outbreak of their horribly bloody civil war, Sierra Leone released these.

Science friction. About a year ago, Jerry Falwell made his famous suggestion that liberal organizations like the ACLU were indirectly responsible for the September 11 attacks. A more recent theory suggests an even more surprising -- and more credible, but that's not saying much -- source: Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy. Either way, the twenty-first is proving to be a difficult century for many science fiction fans and, thanks to 9/11, for horror novelists too.

Hooray for Bollywood Indian films of recent years have exchanged music and romance for serious topics and violent plots that feature only the occasional song-and-dance number. But Indian youth are rising in protest. Bring back the good, clean fun, they say. Oh, and throw in some fast cars and (almost) foreign women. Time for a song! Here's the filmi classic "Mera Joota Hai Japani" (literally, "My Shoes are Japanese"). Okay, where were we? Movies. Crime. Well, we can all rest easier knowing that New York remains secure from potential assault by sightseeing South Indian film stars. Time for another song! Here's the Malayalam favorite "Gopangane". Roll credits. Aacha!

Missing persons. The standard day-tour of the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania, includes visits to several sites related to the Arab slave trade. There's an Anglican church built on the site of the old slave market, and up the coast, a secret slave port that sprouted after the British ended the above-board export of captured Africans. What's less clear, after your day of touring and even after reading many a book of colonial and post-colonial history, is what happened to the slaves after they left East Africa. Slaves taken from West Africa -- those that survived -- became the ancestors of millions of black and multi-racial Americans, Caribbeans, and Brazilians alive today. But what of those taken to Arabia? They show up as plot devices in the Thousand and One Nights, but after that they seem to have been forgotten. You don't, after all, generally think of the Gulf States having significant black populations ... though there is a surprising amount of racial diversity among the members of Qatar's national basketball team.