Saturday, May 26, 2012 

I saw something about Ergenekon in the Turkish Daily Tattler yesterday. It seemed so quaint: so people are still talking about Ergenekon!

The piece involved an interview with Yaprak Gürsoy from Istanbul's Bilgi University. Here are some of the things she had to say:
...

Friday, May 25, 2012

   
  Thursday evening, approx. eight pm

Thursday, May 24, 2012 

Last week I celebrated the end of the semester by heading up to Glacier with the Bordergirl. First we drove over to Missoula, home of the hated Grizz, then traveled up past Flathead Lake in the northwest part of the state. Our destination: Glacier National Park...

Thursday, May 10, 2012 

I woke up this morning to snowfall outside. Just the day before, I'd been riding my bike in seventy-degree weather. It stopped snowing by late morning, and by late afternoon today it had been replaced by sunshine and warm temperatures...

Tuesday, May 8, 2012 

Monday, April 16, 2012 

Back before I began lurking in the shadows of the Russian-Turkic borderlands, I was an MA student at Princeton's department of Near Eastern Studies. And though I've tried my hardest to repress those years, they continue to come back to me on occasion, blasting my hard drive with the occasional ...

Friday, March 9, 2012

Well folks, I've got a new article out. It's a chapter in an edited volume put together by the folks at the Slavic Research Center in Hokkaido. The volume is entitled Asiatic Russia: Imperial Power in Regional and International Contexts and my piece is called "The Economics of Muslim Cultural ...

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Well folks, up here at the Borderlands Lodge we've had, of course, very little snow this winter. That sucks, from a skiing standpoint, even if that has made it easier for me to continue tooling around town by bike.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

I read an interesting set of editorials in the NYT today about Russia, Putin, and the latest elections. Interesting stuff, but maybe I'm just saying that because I'm still a Russia geek, even after all these years.

Sunday, January 22, 2012 

Well folks, these have been some pretty busy times up at the Borderlands Lodge. The new semester started a couple of weeks ago, and the two classes I've been teaching—"The Making of Modern Turkey" and "Eurasian Borderlands"—have gotten off to a fast start. Writing, too, has kept me pretty busy.

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Tuesday, December 10, 2012 

Happy New Year! I don’t know about you folks, but I had a pretty great New Year’s break...and I think that means it's time for some New Year's N & P ...

Tuesday, December 20, 2011 

When I came back to the US in 1999 to begin an MA at Princeton, I didn't have a fellowship. Instead, I used my savings at the time and took out $28,000 in student loans. Fortunately, I was given a fellowship for my second year and never had to take out a student loan again. ...

Saturday, December 17, 2011 

Up here at the Borderlands Lodge, this week has provided a welcome respite. This semester has been a busy one, of course. As many of you know, I spent the spring semester and summer in DC, and ever since my return to the land of the mountains in ...

Saturday, December 17, 2011 

Up here at the Borderlands Lodge, this week has provided a welcome respite. This semester has been a busy one, of course. As many of you know, I spent the spring semester and summer in DC, and ever since my return to the land of the mountains in August I've been working hard on the ...

Thursday, October 13, 2011 

In case you missed it, the so-called "Value Voters Summit" took place this past weekend in Washington, DC. Ron Paul won the straw poll that was conducted at the end of the convention, beating out fellow GOP candidates who had likewise come to DC to speak at the VVS and attempt ...

Monday, September 12, 2011 

Amid all of the commentary that has come out over the past week or so about remembering the 9/11 attacks, I thought I'd write about 9/12.

Thursday, August 25, 2011 

Well, it looks like the moment folks have been waiting for has finally arrived: Muammar Gadaffi appears to have left Tripoli, and perhaps right now is hiding in a spider-hole somewhere. Who knows?

In a post put up yesterday, Juan Cole—someone whose views I have a ...

Friday, July 29, 2011 

Pardon me if I haven't been posting much lately—I've been too busy burying gold bars and non-perishable food items in my backyard.

Seriously, though, these are ugly times here in the imperial metropole. What's most frustrating of all, however, is how completely unnecessary this crisis is.

...

Wednesday, June 22, 2011 

I was driving through southern Pennsylvania, watching the sun set over West Virginia to my right, while I listened to President Obama's speech on Afghanistan over the radio.

The speech appealed to me in some ways and bothered me in others. On the one hand, ...

Friday, June 17, 2011

Wow—some pretty disturbing news: 

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Fresh off new elections that saw the AKP returned to power with another majority government, Turkey's government is facing an onslaught of thousands of refugees from Syria.

Al-Jazeera reports that the Syrian Army is "splitting apart." Also alleging that Iranian snipers are being ...

Monday, June 13, 2011

I saw an interesting piece in Juan Cole's Informed Comment yesterday. Cole wrote a really sensible response to Robert Gates' recent speech, in which Gates criticized NATO allies for not emulating the United States in spending lavish sums on defense.

This ...

Sunday, June 12, 2011

No surprise here. As everyone has been predicting for weeks, it looks like the AKP will have a big majority, but not enough seats (367) to write a new constitution unilaterally (i.e., without putting it up to a referendum)...

 

Saturday, June 11, 2011

The AKP and Today's Zaman sound like spurned lovers the way they're griping over recent editorials criticizing the AKP in the Economist, ...

Friday, June 10, 2011

There was a thought-provoking and depressing piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education the other day. It was written by Tom Lutz, a professor of Creative Writing at the University of California-Riverside. The piece ...

Thursday, June 9, 2011

I saw a semi-interesting Reuters story a couple of days ago about the apparently growing wealth gap in Turkey...