from the december 12 issue of the new yorker: “Abdullah bin Laden, Osama’s son, today lives in Jedda and enjoys good health, according to several people who know him. In a story published in a London-based Saudi-owned newspaper in 2001, Abdullah said that he left his father’s household in the mid-nineties, when Osama was preparing to leave Sudan, where he had been living in exile, for a new adn uncertain exile in Afghanistan. Not wishing to endure such hardship any longer, Abdullah sought and received his father’s permission to return to Saudi Arabia, where he has since taken up a career in advertising and public relations.

Abdullah runs his own firm, called Fame Advertising, which has offices near a Starbucks in a two-story strip mall on Palestine Street [lol], one of Jedda’s busiest commercial thoroughfares. ‘Fame…Is Your Fame’ is the company’s slogan, according to its marketing brochures. Among the firm’s advertised specialities is “event management,” which refers to the staging of attention-grabbing corporate galas and launch parties for new products or stores. The firm makes this promise: ‘Fame Advertising events are novel, planned meticulously, and executed with efficiency.’ On the back of this brochure is printed a single word: ‘Different.'”