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QASSIM PROVINCE, Saudi Arabia—From the air, the circular wheat fields of this arid land's breadbasket look like forest-green poker chips strewn across the brown desert. But they are outnumbered by the ghostly silhouettes of fields left to fade back into the sand, places where the kingdom's gamble on agriculture has sucked precious aquifers dry. … Saudi Arabia may sit atop the world's largest oil reserves, but the other side of the geological coin is that the country also sits atop one of the world's smallest reserves of water. It does not have a single lake or river. … Muhammad H. al-Qunaibet, a hydrologist and government adviser, estimates that the country uses 6.34 trillion gallons of water a year for agriculture, but says that only a third of that is replaced through rainfall.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/26/international/middleeast/26SAUD.html
BEIJING, Feb. 5—As a child in the 1960's, recalled Huang Rui, an artist, nothing seemed nobler than to become a worker, and no workplace seemed better than the 798 Electronic Components Factory. On the northeast edge of Beijing, mostly making parts for the military, it offered all the prestige and security of a leading state enterprise. … The factory, like many state behemoths, was nearly bankrupt by the end of the 1990's, and most of a work force that once surpassed 10,000 had retired or been laid off. … But over the last 12 months or so, in a sudden and unplanned turn that Mr. Huang has helped spearhead, much of the complex has been rented by avant-garde artists, art dealers, designers, architects and advertising agents—creative types who have noses for great spaces and low rents. The dozens of new tenants, pulled in entirely by word of mouth, are spontaneously creating what by this spring will be a classy pocket of studios, galleries, music clubs and stylish offices, all in an otherwise drab, suburban factory zone. … "Up to now Beijing hasn't had this kind of community anywhere."DIGEST
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/international/asia/06BEIJ.html
• Postmodernism was supposed to be a fortunate break for Christianity. Unlike modernism, which praised secularism as the route to progress and dismissed faith as irrational and irrelevant, postmodernism affirms the epistemological value of perspective, irony, and resonance—which draw on spiritual belief. But the conventional wisdom of our cultural power brokers—academia and the media, for starters—is behind the times, says David Brooks in a lucid and provocative essay in the latest Atlantic called "Kicking the Secularist Habit." A "recovering secularist," Brooks seems to caution religious readers from celebrating his declaration of independence from secularism. After all, he says, secularism was at least inert—its ideal world was calmly material, where progress was logical and religious fervor an aberration. But September 11 has shown us how central and complex belief is in a globalized world: "Now we are looking at fundamental clashes of belief and a truly scary situation—at least in the Southern Hemisphere—that brings to mind the Middle Ages, with weak governments, missionary armies, and rampant religious conflict," Brooks says. "We are inescapably caught in a world of conflicting visions of historical destiny." So if postmodernism means the world will take a new look at Christianity after all, it must just as earnestly appreciate Islam.
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