Almost exactly a month ago I got two calls almost simultaneously. One was a job offer, the other a diagnosis. There is a lot to say about the job situation, but alas that is not for this dispatch. But I’ll say that everything that has happened over the last month has been colored by the …
Category Archives: Articles
“Spiritual but not religious”
It’s pretty sad to think that the world could soon be without Christopher Hitchens. One of the great intellectuals of our time, he is gravely ill with cancer. I once heard him speak at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Shanghai, he spent the evening blasting holes in the idea of God and religion while sipping …
Beyond This Life
What happens after we die? The ultimate question, unanswerable by anyone – and yet billions of us follow ideologies which lay out, step by step, exactly what happens when we cross that last river. Isn’t the fear of death the first basis of all religion? Sometimes I see a movie scene in a hospital, where …
Crowds & Power
When I’ve described the Junta to people more than a few times someone has remarked, “Oh, like a book club”. I always say, “Well, sorta” before clarifying that we are really more of a mock think-tank that has aspirations to topple governments (always important for me to find a way to say that we take …
Wikileaks, Facebook and the Internet Age
We’re gearing up for the next Junta on Tuesday, February 1st at 8:30 PM (final confirmation on location coming soon, but will almost certainly be in Williamsburg). Rindy sent around an email about the agenda on Wikileaks, and while that would certainly be a robust discussion on its own, it occurred to me yesterday that …
Ethnic Conflict: Welcome to 2011
It may be a new year but old (and in some cases ancient) conflicts still plague humanity, I thought I’d highlight a few that I’ve been thinking about as they’ve been/will be in the news. On January 9th the people of South Sudan will vote on whether to secede from Sudan and form their own …
Richard Holbrooke and the U.S. Strategy for Pakistan & Afghanistan
I attended a talk yesterday at the Council on Foreign Relations on U.S. strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan. The talk was started by acknowledging the loss of Richard Holbrooke, the legendary diplomat whose last position was as a special envoy to the Af/Pak region. I posted a while ago about a talk I attended, also …