Southeast of Marfa towards the border of Mexico there is a little ghost town called Shafter. If you leave the highway and follow a dirt road to a tiny plateau you will find an old Mexican cemetery full of ‚wolf graves’. They are very shallow because the ground is so rocky that people can’t dig…

I learn to love these business hotels. They are almost all the same, green carpets with traces of former guests, a coffee machine, a big TV set with additional offerings of mature audience content. You won’t be able to guess where you are until leaving the hotel again.

I wouldn’t believe it, but it was true. I was standing in front of a trash can at the airport with one handful of pennies, ready and willing to just throw them away. In the nick of time I realized what I was about to do and that this at least didn’t suit my serious…

Since several years I have been trying to commit myself to healthy eating. Fruit in the morning, salad for lunch, lots of fish and vegetables. Not to mention the unsalted peanuts I am addicted to.

A ceiling fresco does not need to be beautiful in any case, but it often tells the truth about the times in which it was painted and about the people inspecting it in their social context.

When I came to New Orleans I had no idea how Hurricane Katrina had really hit and destroyed the town. It was a journalist who provided insight, the Feature Editor of the local newspaper, the Times Picayune. The team did a great job covering the storm and its consequences and got two Pulitzer Prices for…

Das Interview zum Blog: ScienceBlogs: Sie waren sicher oft in den USA. Wovon erhoffen Sie sich neue, tiefgründigere Einblicke? Miriam Meckel: Eines der spannendsten Themen ist natürlich der US-Wahlkampf, den ich jetzt aus einem anderen Blickwinkel beobachten kann. Ich habe schon einige Eindrücke zu den brennenden Fragen bekommen, mit denen ich mich beschäftigen muss: Rassen-…

At an evening reception these days in Philadelphia I spoke to a business man about 60 years old. As in lots of other discussions the talk quickly triggered the U.S. elections. He told me he was about to change his registration as a Republican to be able to vote for Barack Obama at the upcoming…

Incredible it is how things change after a few days abroad. Having been away now for more than a week from office, daily working routines, a flood of emails, regularly looking after the dishwasher, trying to squeeze in laundry between two meetings uphill and downhill I feel my life has sweepingly changed. More though: I…

Do politicians lie? Yes, from time to time they do. That’s what we all know. Hillary Clinton made it easy to disprove her creative narrative of getting into sniper fire in Bosnia in March 1996.