Time
January 8, 2015
I’m a journalist but was only by chance in the vicinity of the massacre at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. I was en route to visit a friend. This took me past the paper’s office and thus put me at the heart of the bloodiest attack France has seen in the past 50 years.
Ricochet
January 8, 2015
I had no intention of reporting on this from the scene of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. I was walking up Boulevard Richard Lenoir to meet a friend who lives in the neighborhood. But the moment I saw what I did, I knew for sure what had happened. A decade in Turkey teaches you that. That many ambulances, that many cops, that many journalists, and those kinds of faces can mean only one thing: a massive terrorist attack.
Continue reading First-Hand Account From The Terrorist Attack on Charlie Hebdo
America’s muted response is both confusing and disheartening.
CITY JOURNAL
28 June 2013
President Obama surely knows that the current unrest in Turkey, which has left at least four dead, 12 blind, and some 7,000 injured, many critically, does not remotely compare—as a humanitarian disaster or as a threat to American interests—to the unremitting carnage in Syria; to the urgency of evaluating the meaning of Iran’s elections and what they portend for its nuclear program; to the rapidly deteriorating security situation in Iraq; to our imminent defeat in Afghanistan; or to at least half a dozen other foreign policy crises of greater moment, not least in the Pacific.
The National Review, October 1997
AN ENGINEER I met in Vientane told me that development workers always arrived in Laos with high hopes. After a year they would sink into a funk, but after another year, they would make their peace with the country. They would learn to play a terrific game of tennis.
I had come to Laos to work for the United Nations Development Programme. Created between France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu and Britain’s withdrawal east of the Suez,
Continue reading Vientiane Times: A Sojourn Among the Development Workers
PUBLISHED (IN HIGHLY ABRIDGED FORM) IN US NEWS & WORLD REPORT
July 9, 2013
If you’re reading the American press, you might think that the protests in Turkey have died down. Nothing could be further from the truth. On July 6—last Saturday—delivering a stern rebuke to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Istanbul 1st Regional Court issued a decision cancelling the controversial Taksim construction and the Artillery Barracks project, thus reopening the park for public use.
GATESTONE INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL
August 20, 2012
An unshocking admission: I’ve made some ungodly-embarrassing retraction-worthy journalistic mistakes over the course of my career. Almost every journalist does. It’s hard to write about complex events at once quickly, without boring your readers witless, and without making mistakes. One example in particular embarrasses me; I’ll share it with you at the end of this piece.
FIRST POST
July 27, 2009
Almost 10 years ago exactly, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck northwestern Turkey, killing as many as 40,000 people. Thousands were crushed in their beds when their buildings, such as the one pictured above in Kaynasli, collapsed.
An outcry ensued over the shoddy construction material, loose building codes and widespread corruption among licensing officials: these were correctly blamed for the high death toll.
Continue reading Turkey must act to avert an earthquake tragedy
Published in abridged form in The Tower
June 2013
Part 1: Laying Pipe
In the sitcom business, they call it “laying pipe.” It means the exposition of the backstory, the quick explanation of the events that set the plot in motion. Sitcom writers admire each other for the economy with which they lay pipe. In writing about Turkey, the hardest part is that before you can even begin to say anything interesting, you need to lay ten miles of pipe, and by that point you’ve lost your audience.
THE AMERICAN
December 2008
Atatürk’s victory over the Entente powers was complete and irreversible, but if contemporary critics of Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish acronym, AKP) are correct, his victory over the retrograde forces of religion is not. Recently, the AKP’s attempt to lift a 1989 prohibition on headscarves in Turkish universities prompted a constitutional crisis.
November 3, 2009
THE NATIONAL
ISTANBUL Some of the writers who gathered on Tuesday evening to read selections from their work at the D& R bookstore on Istiklal Caddesi, Istanbul’s main pedestrian boulevard, had trouble understanding one another. The reading was one of dozens of events held city-wide as part of the four-day long, inaugural Tanpınar Literature Festival, organized by Istanbul’s Kalem literary agency.