It’s Your Money (and Mine)!
So, we’ve gone and done it again. We just topped ourselves as a species for spending cash on various ways to kill each other. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), global military spending in 2016 rose for the second consecutive year to $1.7 trillion. In case that number doesn’t mean much to […]
Read MoreTime of Our Lives
Happy New Year to all! I hope you were able to ring in 2017 in style last night. Many, I know, were only too happy to leave 2016 behind. As long as I can remember, never have I heard so many people say “good riddance” to a calendar year. Whether it was the brutal war […]
Read MoreArt Imitates Death in Turkey
I never met Russian Ambassador Andrey Karlov, murdered here in Turkey yesterday. Had I, I’m fairly certain, like many others, I would have disagreed with his views and especially his country’s actions in Syria, which likely caused his death. But none of this in any way justifies the killing. This incident, coupled with last week’s […]
Read MoreToo Much “Terrorism”
Place: Bucharest | Drink: shot of tuică | Not all violence is terrorism. I don’t want to downplay terrorism, for there is clearly too much of it in the world today and most of it is quite horrible. Yet also troubling is a recent trend among world leaders, international media, and the general public to label […]
Read MoreInnocence & Resilience
Place: Istanbul | Drink: Monkey Shoulder blended whiskey | Late Friday night, listening to fighter jets hurtle overhead as a coup attempt erupted on nearby streets, I found myself thinking about a passage from The Museum of Innocence. The concept of rebellion features only tangentially in the novel by Nobel prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, but the passage and […]
Read MoreKirk Wolcott’s First Novel
Politics, terrorism, and sports collide in this riveting debut novel by American diplomat and former sportswriter Kirk Wolcott, prompting a crucial question for our time: How far is too far when trying to change the world?
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Kirk
04/26/2017
Peace, Conflict & Terrorism
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