Beirut- Some thoughts on my days on Cyprus before heading here to Lebanon on my new-ish Substack.
Farewell to Larnaca
Category: Uncategorized
I’ve Launched a Substack
Mykonos—This took me far too long to decide, but I’ve finally joined the Substack online community. I’ve always been a late adopter to social media, in part because I’m a late adopter to technology in general, from a baseline of…
Peter Arnett’s Recounting of Bin Laden Interview
Thera— In the lead-up to the 25th anniversary of 9/11 this past week, Peter Bergen was all over my YouTube feed detailing CNN’s March 1997 interview in Tora Bora with Osama bin Laden. It immediately brought to mind a time…
A Killing in Ramallah-The Life and Death of Raffaele Ciriello
The street musicians of Lviv. Music is resistance.
Thera- One evenig two summers ago I found myself in front of the Lviv National Opera House just awestruck by this local trio performing in the middle of Prospekt Svobody. I was struck by the precision and intensity of their…
Kurdistan’s Independence Referendum-A Brief Look Back
Thera- I made a (very) short) video on my Fabled City Youtube channel about the failed Kurdistan independence referendum which was now nine years ago. Hard to believe 2017 was that long ago. I had just got back to Erbil…
RAND Cites my Caucasus Fieldwork
New York- My fieldwork in the Caucasus is cited in the report titled “Religion, Conflict, and Stability in the Former Soviet Union” published by the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica. My work for CTC West Point is footnoted in Chapter…
My Work on North Korean Statues in Africa Cited in DC
New York- My field research on North Korean monuments across post-colonial Africa was cited by the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea in their report titled Illicit: North Korea’s Evolving Operations to Earn Hard Currency by Sheena Chestnut…
My India Work Cited by Yale University Press
An article of mine from my days at Asia Times Online was cited in Great Game East: India, China, and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier by noted Swedish journalist Bertil Lintner. Great Game East explores the decades old…
The Transcendence of the Tanbur
New York- Yes, I’m doing another quick tanbur post. In all my years traveling across Iraq and Syria as a reporter and analyst, there was a lot of downtime while waiting in limbo for access to this or that story…
TWD’s Fieldwork in the Qandil Mountains Cited
New Yiork- My fieldwork on Kurdish militancy in the Qandil mountains of Iraq’s Erbil governorate was cited by the Central European Journal of International and Security Studies published by Metropolitan University Prague. In The PKK’s Friends and Foes in the…
TWD Cited by Oxford University Press
New York- My foundational work in the very early days of the Sahelian crisis is cited in a new book by Dr. Morten Boås of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. His forthcoming work is titled Sahel: The…
TWD Cited by Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
New York- I’m happy to share that my work in Mali for the CTC Sentinel was cited by the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. The paper entitled Mali: A Political Economy Analysis examines the historical roots of this…
Exploring Monolithos: Santorini’s Otherworldly Beach
New York- I’ve finally edited and uploaded the last of my Europe content to my Fabled City channel. In this vlog I take the viewer from Karterados down a giant hill to Monolithos, a moon-like volcanic beach on the back…
Chasing the Sunset: Overtourism on Santorini
New York- I have a new episode out today on my Fabled City channel on the au currant topic of how many tourists are too many on the legendary volcanic Cycladic island. As a lot of news outlets were covering…
New Santorini Travel Vlog from Pyrgos
New York-Although I’ve been back home for a solid few weeks now, I’de been way to busy to edit and upload my Greece travel vlogs but here is the first in a short series. The hilltop village of Pyrgos that…
100 Hours in Western Ukraine
New York- I have a new yet belated vlog up today from my recent trip to Ukraine. This was difficult to put together in the sense that going over the footage I had to relive making the decision to abandon…
Back in Baghdad: Iraq 20 Years On
Baghdad- I returned to the Iraqi capital by road via a nearly identical route I took twenty years ago, two weeks from now. It was the utterly avoidable, wholly unnecessary war we could have avoided. Somewhat similar to Afghanistan, Iraq…
Generation-X Takes the Reins in Cyprus
Aqaba- I have a new article out this week for Janes Intelligence Review (behind a paywall) about last month’s election of Nikos Christodoulides in Cyprus. The election marks a generational shift in [Greek] Cypriot politics as he will be the…
Fabled City Beirut Episode Now Up
Amman- After being here in Jordan a good few days now I’ve finally gotten my first Lebanon episode up on my Fabled City channel. Had a number of tech snafus in recent days with my iPhone flying out the car…
New Cyprus Work for Jane’s Intelligence Review
Nicosia- I have a new article out reporting from the Cypriot capital on the February presidential election pasted below. Have a look!
Fabled City Episode 3 Is Now Live
Beirut- I’ve got my very short Athens excursion up on my still new-ish Fabled City channel embedded above. I had a very short layover in the Hellenic capital the other week between Barcelona and Larnaca the other week and spontaneously…
I’ve Launched a Youtube Channel for 2023
New York- After the past three years of my life were largely wasted in terms of career, I’m finally taking the plunge back into the wider world. Since 9/11 until March 2020, I had made a name for myself, not…
Pakistan’s One-Man Noah’s Ark in Troubled Waters
New York-I appeared on a Twitter Spaces panel by The Redline Podcast‘s Francis Leach and Michael Hilliard about the current state of prime ministerial politics in flood-embattled Pakistan.I spoke alongside Michael Kugelman, Sahar Kkan, and Fereeha M Idrees. Khan was…
A Bombastic Recluse
New York- The 2nd half of the Noiser Podcasts production on the life, obscurantist rule, and death of President Saparmurat Niyazov is out this week. As I stated in my previous post since I didn’t shoot a single photo during…
The Pariah Becomes Paramount
New York- I’m featured in this week’s episode of Noiser Podcasts‘ Real Dictators series about Gaddafi’s escalating feud with the United States and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom in the 1980s. The north African strongman had famously, if…
Nineteen
New York- Yesterday was the nineteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States by al-Qaeda. The plot involved numerous Saudis and adhered to a zero sum Egyptian ideological backbone in which the ummah, or global Islamic community, is…
The Very Uncertain Future of the SDF: Global Repercussions and Local Geopolitical Consequences
Thera- In northern, and more recently eastern, Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) emerged as the critical indigenous force in the conventional battle to defeat the so-called Islamic State (IS). The SDF is an aggregate, underfunded outfit comprised of an…
Salafist Technologists: How I Discovered an Internal IS Map App
New York- A couple of months ago I was riding in a van along a rough hewn piste in Deir ez-Zor governorate’s al-Jazeera region east of the Euphrates river when i was shown a map app that IS had used…
The Tearing Pearl
Fremantle- I have a report out this week for Jane’s Intelligence Review from my recent travels in troubled Sri Lanka. I spent a few weeks on the island finishing up work from Syria and simultaneously conducting some field work before…