I was working on a piece about transliterating Arabic into Latin script, along with some notes about pronunciation, to post yesterday, but then I spent 12 hours in front of a television set simultaneously horrified but unable to stop watching.

There are no words, in any language, to make sense of the senselessness of what happened yesterday, or the pain of seeing that list of the dead with the numbers “6” and “7” after most of the names, and I know that the sadness I’m feeling is infinitessimal compared to what the families of all the victims are feeling. My thoughts go out to them. I will be back to the focus of this blog in the next couple of days, as life permits.