Author name: craigduff

Chicago’s most famous ceiling: the Louis Pierre Rigal murals on the lobby ceiling of the Palmer hotel (now a Hilton). They’re currently being restored.

Great news. Pictures of the Year International has named the TIME project Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience – a multimedia presentation of video oral history and portraits by photographer Marco Grob – as 2011 Documentary Project of the Year.

It’s been an awful week in Syria, and a deadly one for reporters witnessing and covering the violence there. On Tuesday, Marie Colvin, an American reporter working for The Sunday Times of London, told the BBC the violence happening in the Syrian city of Homs was “absolutely sickening.” Colvin compared the siege of the city

The eldest of the two sister EMMY Awards in my possession didn’t make the transit well from New York to Evanston. When unpacking the boxes I had shipped from the office at TIME to the new office at Northwestern, I discovered one golden gal had been cut off at the ankles. Because it’s made from

Now that I have a full-speed connection, I’m uploading more photos from my trip to the Middle East. Here are more pictures from January 25th in Tahrir square, where I joined TIME correspondent Abigail Hauslohner and reporter/translator Sharaf al-Hourani. It seems almost quaint now, given all that’s happened there (and is still happening) in the days

Politics and events can shroud a country’s richest assets from its image. Say Libya and you think Gaddafi and civil war, or OPEC or Lockerbie. You don’t immediately think of a rich Mediterranean history and the Barbary Coast. And I hadn’t either when I pursued a visa to visit my friend Carolyn, who is working for

“Have you ever heard of a singing vacation?” one of the women at the Christina hotel asked me. I admitted that I had not. But about a dozen women had come from the Netherlands to this hippie-esque resort village on the Sinai peninsula to do just that: sing. For a week, they’ll be led by

In Dahab this week, there are about 1/20th the usual number of tourists, it’s half the temperature it was last time I was here, and there are at least twice as many cats. It’s cold in Dahab. Colder than average this time of year. Too chilly to scuba dive (at least for me). So I’ve

It’s funny what you remember instantly when all your senses are engaged. Four and a half years after leaving Cairo (where I spent a year as Knight Fellow and first began this blog) so much had faded from memory. But it all comes back as I see and smell and taste and feel this wonderful