Alexis attributed his mental-health issues to his assignment in cleaning up contaminated debris at the 9-11 Ground Zero site, but the Navy claims no such record of this work. A report in British paper Daily Mail notes Alexis was seen exiting a subway near the World Trade Center just as the twin towers were collapsing. The sight, it says, quoting Alexis' father-in-law, left him "traumatized." Indeed, the career of Alexis runs parallel to the 9-11 era, when thousands of servicemen were assigned to secret combat missions that do not appear on their military records.

Often on prominent display, Slavoj Zizek is radical philosophy incarnate. Hirsute, animated, staggeringly intelligent and expectedly misanthropic (it comes with the cognitive territory), Žižek is the "hero Gotham deserves". Or, to draw from the Socratic quote, he and his contemporaries have been attached to our epoch "by the god." Žižek  and co. (Tariq Ali,  Alain Badiou, Noam Chomsky) practice the art of ripping our society a new one, prompting incisive questions that beget awkward pauses and shuffling of feet from the addressed. They largely function to upset the status quo (or, bureaucratic routine). 

Buddhism made a bleep in the news early this month when the Times of India and other news outlets, citing an unnamed source, reported that Bill Clinton, has turned to Buddhism for mental and physical well-being. The former president went so far as hiring a Buddhist monk to teach him the arts of meditation. This may come as a surprise to some but to many others, it's only a natural course of how things transpire in the globalized world. For if Americanization is a large part of globalization, the Easternization of the West, too, is the other side of the phenomenon.