michael ra kowitz, welcome we are in? michael rakowitz, welcome to hardtalk.ou, stephen, thanks to having the. is a great pleasure to having the. is a great pleasure to have you. it seems to me, in your work there is a duality. you are an american kid, an american man, yet you seem intensely conscious of your heritage that comes, certainly from your grandmother's site, from iraq. why is that duality so important to you? it became important when it went from being something that was so went from being something that was so normal to something that seemed so so normal to something that seemed so paradoxicalfor so normal to something that seemed so paradoxical for people. so normal to something that seemed so paradoxicalfor people. i grew up ina so paradoxicalfor people. i grew up in a house where my grandmother and my grandfather on my mum's side and my grandfather on my mum's side and my mum had come from iraq via bombay to the united states in 1946, and i grew up in a house where it wasn't at all odd to hear my mother and my grandmother talking in arabic in th

but for now, michael ra kowitz, thank you very much for being on hardtalk. hello.roved and our weather watchers were very much out in force, probably encouraged by the fact that it was such a glorious day all the way from scotland to the south coast and across the irish sea and into northern ireland, but that's really rather cruel to use that particular picture to bring you the message that it will be on friday another glorious day for many parts of the british isles because, i'm afraid to say, that belfast and indeed much of northern ireland, it won't be that way for you, and the seeds of the destruction of your glorious friday were there being sown on thursday with this veil of cloud moving in from the atlantic and as we get into the first part of friday, well, the rain will already be there, and how, across northern ireland, and it may already be flirting with the western side of scotland as well. but at least underneath that veil of cloud, it won't be such a cold start to friday in the west as it will be in the east because your skies will be that bit clearer.