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Beautiful thing about this is editing it after the fact.

So when I say something stupid, I can de-stupidify it.

It's like having an edit button on Twitter.

It is.

It is.

All right.

All right.

So welcome to another episode of Angry Planet, where we talk about all the worst things and bring them into your home.

I'm being joined today by David Farris, who is a writer and a professor.

And actually, one of the reasons why we're talking to him today is because actually he happened to have been in Syria where we don't know a lot of people who've actually traveled to Syria.

So, David, if you could sort of introduce yourself and give people your background a little bit.

Yeah, sure.

So I teach political science at Roosevelt University.

I'm a contributing writer at Newsweek and Slate.

And I was trained as a political scientist, like a political science specialist in the Middle East in the early 2000.

So I took my first trip to the region in 2003. I spent the summer in Lebanon where I have some ancestry,

but where no one in my family has ever actually traveled. So I was the first Ferris to go to

this place called Amshit north of Beirut, where my grandparents are from. And I just took Arabic classes there for about six weeks at the American University of Beirut.

...