at that age, about the consequences of our new heightened fear of Islamic terrorism. I got into an argument with a history teacher—who doubled as my basketball and track team coach—about whether this militant jingoism would end up leading to martial law or restrictions on freedom of speech. He didn’t think it would, but I had seen the movie The Siege, starring Denzel Washington and cowritten by Lawrence Wright, a few years before that: it imagines a series of terror attacks in New York City, in which the official response is to round up Muslims and detain them in stadiums. The intense
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