I have been fascinated, and nervously hopeful, as the people of one Arab country after another assert themselves. Syria is the first of these countries I have actually visited, and my thoughts are with them today. I have added a new category to the “Work” section of this site: “Photos,” which I am inaugurating with some images of Syria, from my brief two-week visit in 1995. Its warm and generous people were as curious about me as I was of them. These photos only hint at the feel of the place, the accumulation of thousands of years of ordinary lives, the tense hush of political repression laying like a thin blanket. May this latest chapter in this peoples’ long history end well.