The Tribune

Prayer Do you sometimes look at your watch and don’t know what time it is? Do you sometime go to sleep, wake up thinking you’re somewhere but discover you’re somewhere else? Do you sometimes go to a room in your house and wonder why you went there? Do you sometime feel so helpless that you say to yourself “God help me,” regardless of what your religion is? I do too! I can go on with an exhaustive list of those little things that we have in common and define us as human beings.

Throughout my short life, friends and colleagues have often asked me why I wear a veil when I travel abroad, and why I choose to hold on to my Islamic values and Egyptian traditions. For some of them, this is something quite odd and surprising. I came to Canada a couple of years ago to pursue my PhD at McGill.

Ann Coulter is a bit of a troublemaker, isn’t she? I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the firebrand conservative columnist. A strong advocate for small government, Coulter is also an unapologetic advocate for Western society’s ethics. She decries the silencing tendencies of political correctness and never gives in to moral relativism.

Thanks to the great privilege afforded to me by living north of the 49th parallel, I find the American right really funny. The Bill O’Reillys, the “These Colours Don’t Run” American-flag T-shirts, and everything Fox News has to offer are far more entertaining and, frankly, far less disingenuous than the earnest approach to conservative ideas put forward by the “liberals” of the Democratic Party or our own Conservative Party of Canada.

My name is androgynous. Upon hearing it, you cannot tell if I am a boy or a girl. Some people say that they can tell if they know how it’s spelled: Jessie is a girl and Jesse is a boy. I doubt my parents meant to spell my name the “boy” way, but I sometimes wonder whether it was a Freudian slip; whether somehow, even then, they knew.

There is one massive economic difference separating ideas from physical goods: The marginal cost of an idea is now zero. If I eat a sandwich, you cannot also eat it, but once an idea, an essay, a song or a better web browser comes around, it can be shared, from anyone and to everyone, network to network, at a negligible additional cost.