At a moment when distortions of Islam are what feed most Americans, Ibrahim Abdul-Matin has done something both practical and inspiring. He persuades us that the imperiled environment is both common struggle and common ground for people who share, it turns out, more than simply God.

Design is the courage and brilliance to cover an original and make it different.

An object imbued with intent — it has power, it's treasure, we're drawn to it. An object devoid of intent — it's random, it's imitative, it repels us. It's like a piece of junk mail to be thrown away.

Design [is] the emerging ethos formulating and then answering a very new question: What shall we do now, in the face of the chaos that we have created?

In general, I think very few people have a sustained interest in news.

The song is just the given. It's how you cover it that matters.

In America access is always about architecture and never about human beings. Among Israelis and Palestinians, access was rarely about anything but people. While in the U.S. a wheelchair stands out as an explicitly separate experience from the mainstream, in the Israel and Arab worlds it is just another thing that can go wrong in a place where things go wrong all the time.