Cold War Illusions: Losing Friends
Just before the November 2016 elections, I was invited to share lunch at a place called Packer’s Corner, a tiny hamlet in southeastern Vermont. I was instantly intrigued. If “faded glory” fairly describes the place now, Packer’s Corner et ses…
Reconstructing the Middle East
How Might It Be Done? There is an odd precision attaching to certain key events in the Middle East. Jimmy Carter’s third and final State of the Union address on January 23, 1980, was his “doctrine” speech and set in…
Reinventing the Foreign Correspondent
Between 1990 and 2004, three years before he died at 74, Ryszard Kapuściński gave a series of lectures around Europe. These shared a theme that suggests a late-in-life preoccupation. A half-dozen of Kapuściński’s talks were published posthumously (in 2008) as…
The Decay of American Media
Toward a Poor Journalism One evening a half-dozen years ago, I stayed at the house of Albert Maysles, the noted documentary filmmaker, in upper Manhattan. I had just flown in from Hong Kong, where I was living at the time….
Cold War By Other Means
Ukraine: the Crisis in Context It is never easy to see the present as history: Being inside events, being the stuff of which events are made, makes distance and the perspective that comes of it difficult. It is not a…
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