by Elizabeth Weingarten

It’s nighttime, and we’re driving through the streets of Cairo.  I see the obscure, glittering water of the Nile – and a street so jammed with traffic it makes the streets of Qatar’s capital city look like abandoned country roads.  We’re listening to Britney Spears, Hilary Duff, Miley Cyrus and Glee music.  It’s as if I’ve been dropped into a 12-year-old American girl’s sleepover party – only I’m in a small speeding car with three Egyptian college students.

I have come to the Middle East to intern for three magazines based in Doha, Qatar.  On a break from work, I have decided to travel to Egypt.  From the back seat of the car, I find myself comparing the cities.  Most Qataris spend their leisure time indoors, in glossy, generic malls. In Cairo, the streets and sidewalks were teeming with people. I feel overwhelmed by the perfume of street falafels, shisha, and exhaust fumes.

Egypt is a land of contradictions.  Once the cradle of civilization, it’s now classified as a “developing” country.  Horse-drawn carriages rush by carrying produce as women navigate the bustling crowd with baskets of food on their heads.  Magnificent, ancient mosques are surrounded by moats of garbage.  The streets are filthy and wildly congested.  Egyptians can trace their ancestry back more than 7,000 years; they are the descendants of the brilliant pyramid engineers, the innovators of papyrus, hieroglyphics and the 365-day calendar.  Yet money – and cleanliness – are as scarce as the seat belts in taxis.

Egypt’s cultural opulence is as apparent as its extreme poverty.  In that sense, I have never seen a richer country, or one with a more authentic character.  Cairo is a blunt, confrontational city.  It does not apologize for its faults, but implores you, the visitor, to find them charming: the local radio station, for example, calls the traffic “cozy and considerate.”  It’s hard not to love a place that is so adored by its inhabitants.

On the first day, I received a marriage proposal.  On the second, two Egyptians gave me their phone numbers so I could stay with their families the next time I came to Egypt.  A few others offered to teach me Arabic.  The fabled Khan El-Khalil souq (market) proved intoxicating, as the spicy air was infused with cigarette smoke and frying chickpeas.  Myriad languages and currencies zigzagged through the narrow paths.  And every other step meant another jarring business proposal from a merchant.  The best one?  “You are beautiful.  How can I take your money?”

With its innovative skyscrapers, unfathomable oil wealth and countless construction projects, Doha might appear to be a more modern city than Cairo.  Modernity, however, doesn’t always equate to accessibility.  There are street names, and even a few signs, but they are seldom used.  Residents find places through landmarks.  To say it is difficult to get around is a bit of an understatement.  Each time I reach a destination (safely), it is a small miracle.

Shortly after arriving in Doha, I went for a walk and saw only a handful of other people on the streets, most of them construction workers who stared at me like I was insane.  I probably was.  Most streets didn’t have sidewalks, only sand and cobblestones.  I didn’t see a single restaurant or a cafe to sit in––the norm in Egypt––only a few formidable towers rising above the dusty streets.  After about an hour of walking, I reached a boardwalk along the Arabian Gulf called the corniche and finally took a breath of non-polluted air.  I realized – the hard way – why most expats and Qataris spend time in the malls, not in the center of the city.  Dressed in a modest cardigan, scarf, shirt, and jeans, I was sweating.  I wondered how the Qatari women, dressed head to toe in their black abayas, dealt with the oppressive heat.

Air conditioning blasts in the city’s numerous malls year-round. Some are even considered tourist attractions, like the Villagio.  Stepping inside the Villagio is a bit like walking onto the set of The Truman Show.  Truman, as you may remember, lives inside a huge, climate-controlled dome that looks and feels like a town.  Unbeknownst to him, everyone in his life is an actor.  At the Villagio, Qatar has created an indoor village that looks – and feels – like you’re outside when you aren’t.  The ceiling is painted like a sky, and every store looks like a quaint little town shop – even if it’s Versace.  It’s cool until it becomes a little bit depressing, because why not actually go outside since it’s 75 degrees and sunny all the time? Villagio boasts an ice skating rink, an amusement park, and gondola rides through a “river” that runs through the mall.  Like in Venice.

Then there’s The Pearl, Qatar’s newest spectacle in decadent and luxurious living.  It’s a man-made island that will be (I believe) 19 miles long, with villas, five-star hotels, restaurants, schools, parking for yachts, and of course plenty of shopping.  If you’re looking for a bargain….don’t come here.  Shoes can run about QR 4,500 or $1,300.

Cairo’s tourist attractions are significantly older (read: ancient) and less glossy.  There, you’ll find fewer malls and more, well, pyramids.  But Doha and Cairo do share a language and, in many ways, a similar culture of hospitality and chattiness.  These traits seem to exist throughout the region, no matter what city.  In fact, my favorite part about my experiences in both Cairo and Doha were the fascinating conversations I had with cab drivers, store owners and waiters at restaurant.  For me, it was the best way to learn about the local culture, and the only way to pick up Arabic.

One day in Doha, I rode to the Indonesian embassy with a particularly loquacious taxi driver.  He asked me where I was from, and when I answered, he yelled, “Crazy American woman, stay away from me!” and filled the car with harsh, mechanical laughter.  Then we chatted for a while, and he asked why I was there.  His next question was one I got quite often: are you married?  He told me if I wasn’t married in a few years, I could marry his son.

Abdul was my cab driver on my last day in Egypt.  During the first few minutes of our 6 a.m. ride to the airport, I thought he was going to kill me.  His car looked minutes away from collapsing, and he drove as though he couldn’t see any other cars on the road.  Abdul wove through highway lanes while trying to maintain eye contact with me.  It was a kind yet terrifying gesture.

When I told him my name, Abdul shrieked with delight that he had “King Elizabeth” in his car.  We talked about “good Obama,” “bad Bush,” and the tenuous state of Israeli-Egyptian affairs. All in very broken English, of course.  Oh, and he emphatically called me, “Elizabeth, Habebty!” several times.  Loosely translated: Elizabeth, my love.

When I got out of his dilapidated car at the airport, he gave me some snacks from his glove compartment for the road, and promised me a place to stay should I return to Egypt.

“I will come back, Inshallah,” I told him.  Inshallah or God-willing, had, over several months, become one of my favorite Arabic phrases.  It’s an acquiescence of your fate to the higher powers, a realization that you can’t always control the world around you.

Inshallah connects the two worlds of the Middle East—ancient and modern—with spirituality and serenity.  Now, living in Washington, DC, it has been harder to drop “Inshallah” into daily conversations.  But perhaps it is necessary.  Maybe Americans need a word that represents release – an openness to forces that are beyond our control.

Gabrielle Carbone remembers when she thought up sweet basil and goat cheese ice cream.  It was while she was shopping at a farmer’s market.  “I came up with that in about seven seconds,” she says, as she rattles off several other variations.

At one time or another, we’ve all wondered what it would be like to work at an ice cream shop.  Would we ever get tired of it?  Carbone hasn’t yet, nor has she exhausted the possibilities of flavor combinations, even at 425 and counting.

Her inventiveness – and the uncanny rightness of those combinations – has won national recognition for The Bent Spoon, the ice cream shop she opened in 2004 with Matthew Errico in Princeton, New Jersey.  It’s truly artisenal fare, and Carbone speaks of terroir the way oenophiles speak of wine.

“If you can get your hands on a wild berry, do so,” she says.  “There is such a difference in flavor.”  Supermarket produce, she explains, loses most of its flavor in transit.  “Knowing where your food comes from and what’s in it is such an important connection, one I think many people are missing today.”

Every once in a while, her suppliers come into the store.  “There they are standing in line with everyone else, and I describe a flavor to a customer.  ‘This is made with Cherry Grove rosemary, and hey, turn around, there’s the farmer who grew it.’  It can’t be better than that.”

Carbone and Errico grew up in New Jersey and really do think of it as the Garden State, despite what others might think.  “When I was growing up, we got tomatoes from our own garden,” she says.  “Fresh local food was one of those things that you just had, and then you got to college and realized there was a need for it.”

She spends much of the week collecting fresh berries, honey, eggs, and cream from local providers, using only what’s in season.  Except when midwinter demand forces her to look elsewhere.  Currently she supplies fifteen local restaurants in addition to maintaining her own shop.

All this work leaves her little time for inventing new favors – yet somehow they keep coming.  A short list includes tomato, avocado, lavender chocolate, split pea, clove, strawberry marscapone, concord grape sorbet, dark chocolate habenero, mint julep, coconut lime, fresh asparagus, tiramisu, creme freche, pumpkin, ricotta, nectarine sorbet, pear rose geranium sorbet, earl grey, bourbon-vanilla swirled with sea salt, and oyster.

Apparently she’s onto something.  Max and Mina’s in Queens, New York, offers pilsner beer, lox, grass, and chive blossom ice cream.  In Bar Harbor, Maine, you can get butter-flavored ice cream with chunks of real lobster.  Capogiro Gelato in Philadelphia makes purple yam, paprika, and sea salt gelato.

How did Carbone get started in this passion?  “It’s one of those lifelong things: I got my first ice cream maker when I was fourteen – you either put it in a closet or use it, and I was one of the ones who used it.”  After finishing college (with a degree in special education and psychology), she spent a year in Japan teaching English.  Her old love sang to her.  “You can’t always tell if you want to turn the things you love into a job necessarily, but it was becoming more and more clear that I should really do something with food.”

The typical daydream about running an ice cream shop usually explodes when we realize how much weight we’d gain.  Carbone, however, remains amazingly thin.  “I eat ice cream every single day,” she admits.  “But I have a very fast metabolism.”  Or she’s working it off.

Stewart Brand knew he’d startle his friends.  The founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, an ecological bible in the Sixties and Seventies, was coming out for nuclear power.  And that wasn’t all: he had changed his mind about genetically-engineered food, too.

Was this like Jerry Rubin’s transformation from a campus radical to a stockbroker?

No, Brand insists he’s still very much an environmentalist.  His opinions have changed, he says, because the nuclear industry has.  And the global warming crisis has made him what he calls “an eco-pragmatist.”

“I surprised myself,” he admitted recently from his home on a tugboat in Sausalito, California.   “I used to be, you know, pretty much a knee-jerk on this particular subject.  And then because of climate change, I reinvestigated the matter and discovered that I’d been misled in many of the details on how nuclear works.  And I finally got to the point where I’m so pro-nuclear now that I would I would be in favor of it even if climate change and greenhouse gases were not an issue.”

This is the same man who dropped acid with Ken Kesey and produced a concert for the Grateful Dead.  Tom Wolfe describes him in the beginning of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Otis Redding supposedly wrote “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” at a table on his tugboat.

Brand shrugs.  Climate change remains a big issue for him.  “Air pollution from coal burning is estimated to cause 30,000 deaths a year from lung disease in the United States, and 350,000 a year in China,” Brand writes in his new book, Whole Earth Discipline. “A one-gigawatt coal plant burns three million tons of fuel a year and produces seven million tons of CO2, all of which immediately goes into everyone’s atmosphere, where no one can control it, and no one knows what it’s really up to.”

Nuclear power, he observes, has enjoyed a spotless record since the accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986.  “France is eighty percent nuclear,” he says.  “If the U.S. were eighty percent nuclear, how many gigatons of carbon dioxide would not be in the atmosphere?  We could have done that.”

The biggest development since that early generation of reactors is the movement toward micro-plants with a smaller footprint than wind farms or solar fields.

What about nuclear waste?  “Either we will use it as fuel in the so-called fourth generation reactors that are being designed now or we could reprocess it the way the French do,” he says.

But nuclear plants consume huge amount of water.  How does he get around that?  He admits it’s a problem.  “I don’t know anyone who has figured out how to turn heat into electricity without water.”

Brand, who took a degree in biology from Stanford, expected the biggest response to come from his changed mind on genetically-engineered food.  Again, he is sanguine. “The second Green Revolution is the next set of good technology in agriculture.  Not only green in the sense the first one was – higher yield, lower cost, cheaper food, better distribution and all that – but also green ecologically, environmentally green in terms of climate.”

Brand notes how opinions have come around.  “The environmental movement used to hate cities and is now halfway toward loving cities,” he says.  “The Sierra Club has been very active in supporting compactness in cities.”

The Whole Earth Catalog introduced a generation to alternative sources of energy – wind, solar, biodiesel, geothermal – and for its pathbreaking work it won a National Book Award.  It famously began with the words, “We are as gods and we might as well get good at it.”  “We have to get good at it,” he says now.

by Jean Kurlansky

Until a few years ago, Rachel McAdams rode everywhere on her bike.  She liked the exercise – hey, a girl has to stay in shape – and liked not adding to her carbon footprint.  “I didn’t even own a car,” she says.  “I didn’t have a license.”

Then she almost got clobbered by a bus in Toronto.  “I went the wrong way down a one-way street,” she admits.  The native Canadian decided maybe it was time to drive.

Somehow that dose of realism has made her environmental aims all the stronger.  She’s still riding, even in New York and Los Angeles, but putting more of her efforts into other projects with a bigger impact.

With two longtime friends, Didi Bethrum and Megan Kuhlmann, she has launched a website to counter the notion that environmentalism means Birkenstocks, bandannas, and smocks.  Called greenissexy.org, it’s a fun tour of modest eco-choices.  There’s a heavy emphasis on home-grown food, biodegradable products, and tips for using resources wisely.  The tone is breezy, like three friends cutting up, because essentially that’s what it is.

“In addition to saving the planet,” Didi says she loves “anything pickled, and biking to work in heels, but I cannot stand the material velvet, so steer clear if you dare to wear.”

Some of the suggestions are admittedly risible.  Do you really want to cut down on water use by peeing in the shower, or wear a bra made out of recycled plastic?  Fortunately, parts of the site are explicitly for laughs.

Having grown up near the Great Lakes and having spent summers at a cottage, Rachel comes by her concerns naturally.  “I look at the world through a green lens now, but you can’t make yourself crazy,” she told Vogue. “That feeling of green guilt can be really inhibiting.  It’s about a changing mind-set, remembering to turn off the water when you are brushing your teeth.”  She has remodeled her home to make it energy efficient, but her choices are often purely aesthetic.  After a childhood of lake breezes, air conditioning doesn’t feel right to her: “I can’t live with it.  I feel I’m not living in the world.”

But green jeans?  Seriously?  “It takes 2,600 gallons of water to make one pair of blue jeans.  There are jeans that are sustainably made.”

Just before breaking into stardom with Mean Girls, she dyed her hair pink.  Now she sets herself apart in other ways, by living simply – out of the spotlight as often as possible – and working on her craft as an actress.  Hollywood tends to use beauty and throw it away, but she plans on being around for the long haul.

Guys will appreciate that she is formerly a vegetarian.  No, wait…she’s a vegetarian again.  Sexy either way.

by Jack Cheng

The moment you step onto the stage, you can’t help but notice the prescient words painted on the wall behind the audience,  “Follow the fear.”  The quote belongs to the late Del Close, one of the fathers of modern improvisational theater.  Close is known for having taught the likes of Bill Murray and John Belushi, and his spirit lives on at the People’s Improv Theater in Manhattan.

A dozen others and I have gathered here for an Intro to Improv class on a misty Sunday evening.  We’re under the tacit agreement that we’re all trying something new and will likely make fools of ourselves in the process.  But it’s okay, because what happens at Improv stays at Improv (well, mostly).  We’re here for the first of four weekly sessions, and the fact that our audience comprises of fifty empty folding chairs makes the fear only slightly less poignant.

“Our goal here is to reduce the distance between your brain and your mouth,” declares our instructor Kimmy Gatewood.  She starts things off with an icebreaker: each of us has to invent a signature body gesture to go along with our names.  The goal is to keep going back and forth as quickly as possible.

This is the first of many improv games that seem, on the surface, more apropos for summer camp. However, they are all designed to introduce us to the core philosophy of improvisational theater: “Yes, and…”  Meaning, “Yes, I accept your idea and I’m going to make it better,” versus “No, I have a better idea.”  Improv is about accepting what’s given to you and then moving the scene along.

“What if it doesn’t make sense?”

“I don’t know how it’s supposed to end.”

“Is it my turn yet?”

“What if I sound like an idiot?”

These are thoughts running through my head as I await my turn in the second week’s class.  Twelve of us have arranged ourselves in a circle as the person standing in the middle breaks out into song.  She sings until someone else taps in and performs a new song, and so on.  It’s a karaoke lightning round, except without the help of music or on-screen lyrics.  The first run-through is a mess. Some are left repeating bits of chorus while the students on the outside stand paralyzed, trying to think of another tune.  Kimmy points out that when we each have a different playlist in our heads, we stop listening.  We have to open our ears to what is happening in front of us.

Once we get rolling, the inertia from that initial step (the “yes”) carries us to the next one (the “and…”).

In improv you’re never alone.  You’re constantly getting new creative fodder, whether it’s the actions of your fellow actors or feedback from the audience.  If you have a separate agenda from the rest of the team, it shows.

Probably most people think improv is too difficult, something they could never personally do, when in fact it is a familiar human experience.  “We improvise every single day of our lives –

not knowing the next words out of our mouths in a conversation with a friend or co-worker,” says Kimmy.

Of all the improv games and exercises we learn in our four-week class, the ‘three-line scene’ is perhaps the most enlightening.  In it, two people perform the beginning of what could be turned into a full improv scene.  The first person gives the partner a name and begins with a simple physical observation of the other person.  The second person does the same in return, additionally placing them at a particular location.  The first actor then responds, adding more detail to the scene.  It goes something like this:

“Hey Tony, I like your shoes.”

“Thanks Sarah, I see you’ve come to the dance floor prepared.”

“Yes I have.  Hey, they’re calling our number!  Let’s get ready.”

In just three lines, the actors have established context for the audience, and most importantly, for themselves.  We immediately know who is in the scene, how they are related to each other, where they are, and what they’re doing.  At the same time, the actors still have plenty of creative leeway to communicate something interesting and answer other questions like, “Why are they there?” and “What’s going to happen next?”

It’s all about creating context.

The three-line scene – along with the other exercises and games we have played – draw to a head during the final week of class, when we take everything we’ve learned and perform several extended scenes.  While we might not be headlining at Second City anytime soon, to the dozen of us realizing just how far we’ve come, we’re the hottest show in town that night.

Talk about a charmed life: Brad Leithauser goes to Harvard, then Harvard Law, wins a Guggenheim and a MacArthur “genius grant,” marries a terrific fellow-poet in Mary Jo Salter, publishes regularly in The New Yorker, and is even honored by the President of Iceland for “contributions to Nordic literature,” for goodness’ sake. What does this guy know about troubles?

Plenty, apparently. We talked with him about wartime, Detroit, and deep shame, which all figure in his latest novel, The Art Student’s War (Knopf).

By the way, what is a guy from Harvard Law doing writing poetry?
Yeah, you do wonder. Everyone assumes, and quite naturally, that I must have disliked law school, and I didn’t. I really enjoyed being a student. Unfortunately I can’t make a living being a student, and I can being a teacher, but I do prefer being a student to being a teacher. That feeling of coming in with your notebook and pen and staring expectantly at the professor and saying, “Teach me something, tell me something I don’t know,” it’s a very happy role for me. My dad practiced law, but as far as I know, this is my only trip around the planet, so I wanted to do what I love best, and that’s writing.

It seems that this book draws a lot on your family. Has this been a more personal project?
Everything, if you take it seriously enough and work hard enough on it, certainly becomes personal. But in terms of enlisting others, I had my mother go through it, my stepfather, my daughters, my wife, all looking for different things. I taped a lot of people. It was a broad, collaborative project.

The Art Student’s War opens in a Detroit that hasn’t fallen apart yet. Whites and blacks, Turks and Poles, Catholics and Dutch Reformed are all living closely together. But then the riot of 1943 lets us know that all is not okay in this multi-ethnic city. Did the riots of 1967 make an impact on you?

Yeah, I think hugely. In the indirect sense that they had such a big effect on the city, and this was my city. Those riots in the Sixties are still kind of raw, whereas the riots of the Forties seem to have vanished out of people’s memories. The city has failed to get fully back up on its feet. It’s painful for me, because both my parents were Detroiters. I’d like to think that the book is an act of loyalty to them.

You came of age during the Vietnam War, and this has been written during another long war. Did you intend for readers to draw comparisons?
Oh, very much so! What’s striking to me about Iraq and Afghanistan is how few sacrifices we, as a country, have been asked to take on. Nobody has been asked to do anything. The more you immerse yourself in the Forties, you’re seeing that everybody pitched in, even the arthritic old woman who had trouble walking, but her hands were okay, and she knitted sweaters! And the little kids were out collecting bacon grease! I went through every copy of the Detroit newspapers during the war, and there was not an issue that did not embody this notion that we were in this together. Say you were to read a Detroit paper now. Days can go by and there’s hardly a mention of the war! And we can still do everything, we can have tax cuts, we can have this, we can have that. This does not seem to me a viable model on which to proceed as a democracy.

And I’m just horrified at how, whatever side you’re on, such terrible things get said. We need a degree of civility. Part of the pleasure of the book was feeling that while the Forties were difficult, scary times for people – and at the outset of the war, all the news was bad – there was a healthier temperament about what we had to do.

That decency really comes through. And yet there are all these delicious episodes of social unease. A birthday party that’s an utter disaster; awkward luncheons; stilted conversations. Do you love writing those uncomfortable scenes?
(laughs delightedly) Really, I do. I’m the parent of two children. On a figurative level, I’m the parent of all the characters in my books, In both cases, there’s a natural impulse to protect your children from embarrassment, trauma; I think that’s a good, healthy, sane impulse with one’s real, flesh-and-blood children. If you can protect them from the moment where they’re mortified, shamed, you do so. With your characters, you have to overcome that impulse. The more embarrassment, shame, social difficulties you can subject them to, the more vivid they become. You don’t remember the characters where things basically go well. You might like them, but…what you tend to remember in fiction is those squirming moments of “Oh, no, please don’t say that!” or “Please don’t go off with that person!”

There’s a lot in the book about the power of physical beauty: beautiful women, attractive men, and Bea as an artist restoring the good looks of wounded soldiers. Could you say a little bit about your fascination with physical beauty?

You’re absolutely right, and I don’t think that’s been the case with other things I’ve written. This book probably describes color – red, gold, blue – more than any of my other books, because I was seeing things through the eyes of an aspiring painter. And also I wanted somebody who had this heightened awareness of the looks of things, and the looks of people. My Bea has a healthy touch of narcissism; she likes being pretty. She suddenly becomes drawn to this character who is clearly much less good-looking, who draws her in on another level.

Both you and your wife are practicing poets. How has that been for your relationship?

It’s been good. You know, there are levels within levels in any complicated relationship. I don’t think we’re competitive with each other. And if we were, I don’t know how we could make it work. We’ve both come to accept as poets that nobody gets much acclaim. Your books don’t sell many copies. For the first fourteen years that we were married, we lived overseas, so we depended on each other.

So now you’re living in Baltimore. Are you going to poach on Anne Tyler’s turf?

Baltimore is doing better than Detroit in a lot of ways. There’s more life in this city. I would be surprised, though, if I ever set fiction here. I feel less connected to it than I do to Detroit.

I’m working on a novel now, and it’s got another Michigan character. He’s born in Detroit and is teaching at a terrible imaginary college in Ann Arbor that everybody keeps confusing with the University of Michigan, and he always has to explain that he’s not teaching at the University of Michigan, he’s teaching at this place called Ann Arbor College that’s, you know, that has no money.

There are religious dimensions to your novels. Where are you coming from spiritually?
Well, my mother was a deacon of the Presbyterian Church, and my father wasn’t religious at all. They were civil with each other, respected each other. She just loved my father dearly, so she was not going to drag that man to church. He would go once a year, maybe. She was there every week, and I was there, too. I keep writing about religious characters, and I spend a lot of time listening to religious music, but I don’t go regularly to church. I think in a funny way I’m an embodiment of my two kinds of upbringing. I went to church camp and recall those terrible threats being thrown at you. My parents were very liberal, and they decided to move to a Jewish neighborhood for the schools. Which I’ve been very grateful for. In my childhood, I thought that Christians were a minority. At high holy days, the only two kids who came to class were me and my cousin.

In Detroit, there used to be these discrete neighborhoods. Corktown was Irish; Hamtramck was Polish. If you stepped into the wrong church, you felt like you had trespassed. Now things are more blurred. It’s very rich novelistic territory.

When Eboo Patel speaks to young audiences, he often shares one of his favorite verses from the Qu’ran: “God made us different nations and tribes that we may come to know one another.” Still a young man himself, he has accomplished a good deal toward his vision of making interfaith dialogue a large part of campus life.

Patel seems to be everywhere these days. A former Rhodes scholar, currently an advisor to President Obama, he appears frequently on NPR and writes “The Faith Divide” column for the Washington Post. US News and World Report recently called him one of America’s 22 best leaders. He has been named an Ashoka Fellow, part of a group of social entrepreneurs whose ideas are changing the world.

As he recounts in his memoir Acts of Faith , the prejudice he met growing up in Chicago could have made him bitter. But his heroes – Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, the Aga Khan – suggested that faith could unite rather than divide. In 1998, he founded the Interfaith Youth Core (spelled “core” because it is at the heart of a larger movement), which now has a presence on 140 college campuses. Patel credits his highly-regarded staff for making good use of new media and building a social network. Recently we spoke with the peripatetic Patel by telephone.

Where are you today?
I am in Chicago. It’s the only day this week.

How many miles do you log in a year?
Not that many. Most of my travel is domestic. But I’m gone a lot.

You have a son?
He’s two-and-a-half. And a wife. And she reminds me that I actually signed on to be a husband and a father.

What led to the idea of an interfaith youth movement?
It was a reasonably obvious idea. Look – religious traditions inspire service. Young people want to do service. The world needs that, and it certainly needs cooperation among different religious traditions. So why not use service as a way to bring young people of different faith backgrounds together? What’s distinctive about IFYC is that we’ve focused on developing leadership. We train young people to be conversation changers in the world of religion, moving the conversation away from violence and conflict towards cooperation and service. We train young people to launch their own interfaith projects; we network with them for maximum impact. We challenge them to go beyond launching projects to changing their environments, in the same way that the service learning movement went from sponsoring one-time projects to now pervading the culture of high schools.

You’re getting pretty well-established on college campuses.
We hope that college campuses around the country will consider becoming sponsors of interfaith cooperation and create models in which they would nurture young people into interfaith leaders. Many young people have their first interfaith experiences at college, then graduate and become leaders in the culture.

What is it about young adulthood that lends itself to interfaith dialogue?
People are asking deep questions about their identity and how that identity directs them, and we have a message that is extremely exciting for young people—that your religious identity is relevant to the world around you, if you view that religion as a bridge to cooperate with others.

Has interfaith work changed your own religious beliefs?
Well, one of the things it’s helped me to understand is how Islam is relevant to my life in the world. Growing up, Islam was what I did in the local prayer hall and in the privacy of my own home. Once I discovered dimensions of Islam that were calls to service and cooperation, I recognized that my faith had purchase for all aspects of life.

Were you religious as a boy? Did you consider a religious vocation?
I write about this a lot in my memoir, Acts of Faith . Islam was in the air in my home. We said Bismillah before meals or a trip. But the real religion of my house was the religion of American achievement.

Apart from your roots in the city, why have you chosen Chicago as headquarters?
There are many reasons. Chicago has a great history of religious diversity – the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions, for example. It’s where Dr. King met Rabbi Heschel, where the National Council of Christians and Jews was founded. It’s also where a lot of social movements were founded – the community organizing movement, Jane Addams’ settlement house. So we see ourselves as part of a Chicago tradition.

Okay, so in a nutshell, what are you after?
It’s the theology of positive human interaction. I think it should be preached in the pulpit and taught in Sunday school, and it’s the same for Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and humanists. What is it in our beliefs that requires us to cooperate with people who hold different beliefs? I frequently ask high school and college students that question, and it’s hard for them to answer.

What about people of no faith?
Absolutely. At our national conference, Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard, shared the dais with an orthodox Muslim, an evangelical Christian, and an observant Jew. They all felt very strongly about their own beliefs, and they were also comfortable with diversity.
I mean, Greg had just written this book called Good without God. The most important Muslim prayer is “There is no God but God.” So an orthodox Muslim who disagreed with Greg’s entire ontology handed the microphone over to him without hesitation. She was comfortable with giving him the mike because she knows that humanists exist. That’s the theology of human interaction. It does not pretend that certain other people do not exist, but asks: “How do I relate to and cooperate with people who actually believe very differently than I do?”

Are you reaching out to atheists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens?
No. We are working with folks who have very different beliefs but have chosen pluralism. I view those people as somewhat intolerant.

Did you give President Obama any advice for his address in Cairo?
We wrote a memo and had several conference calls about raising the importance of interfaith cooperation, and of course that was included in the Cairo address. We were told that we had an impact.

IFYC has experienced tremendous growth in the first ten years. What have been your biggest frustrations?
We should be as big as the environmental movement, as big as the service learning movement. We are nowhere near to that yet. We should see more stories about interfaith cooperation on the evening news than stories about religious extremism. My staff probably wishes that I would spend a little more time celebrating what we’ve accomplished.

You once said that it might take 40 or 50 years to build the student interfaith movement to reach the point where it could make a big impact. How big is big?
Environmentalism has become a social norm—people doing everything from recycling to buying clean cars. Service learning has also become a social norm—every college campus in America has a great percentage of students engaged in volunteer efforts. Civil rights is a social norm.
We’d like interfaith cooperation also to be a social norm. That means that mosques, synagogues, temples, churches and humanist societies should have interfaith exchanges and service projects just as a matter of course—just like having an Easter service or a Thanksgiving service. It’s just becomes part of what your mosque, synagogue or church does. We think that every Sunday school or mosque school or Hebrew school should be teaching about how its tradition inspires positive human interaction. We think that everyone should stand up against religious prejudice in the way that people stand up against racial prejudice.

Cubs or White Sox?
Cubs, all the way.