December 13, 2019
From December 13, 2019 I just got back from Qatar, a small country in the Middle East you probably don’t think about much, but should. Qatar is the largest liquified natural gas exporter in the world, and the richest country (per capital) in the world. It hosts the largest US military base in the Middle […]
September 17, 2019
In July 1945, the leaders of the three Allied Powers that had just defeated Hitler – Churchill, Truman, and Stalin – met at Potsdam, southwest of Berlin, to plot the continuing war against Japan and the immediate future of post-war Germany. They met at Schloss Cecilienhof, a rambling Tudor mansion built by the Crown Prince […]
March 28, 2018
The house of T.E. Lawrence in the desert of Wadi Rum, Jordan. In this thread, follow me in the footsteps of “Lawrence of Arabia”. T.E. Lawrence was a young English archaeologist and linguist, already experienced in the Middle East, who during World War I joined up as a British Army intelligence officer, based in Cairo. […]
March 31, 2017
In March 2017, my travel pics and WWI tweets converged in the western Uruguay town of Fray Bentos – home of the OXO bouillon cube. In 1840s, German scientist Justus von Liebig became convinced the common practice of boiling beef destroyed much of its nutritional value. In 1847, Liebig invented “meat extract” as a means […]
August 18, 2019
In May 1961, a group of interracial civil rights activists journeyed together through the South to challenge the non-enforcement of US Supreme Court rulings outlawing segregation on interstate buses. During a recent road trip through Alabama, I followed their path. Dubbed the “Freedom Riders” and sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), they planned […]
September 29, 2019
A trip to Weimar, Buchenwald, and two very different Germanies. In 1775, the duke of the tiny German state of Saxe-Weimar invited the German-speaking world’s hottest new celebrity, 25-year old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, to take up residence in his quiet little capital. Goethe was famous because of his hit novel “The Sorrows if Young […]
August 14, 2019
This is a post about my visit in the summer of 2019 to Tuskegee University, in eastern Alabama, which was an opportunity to learn about two amazing Americans and the legacy they left behind. Those two individuals are Booker T. Washington, the founding president of the school, and George Washington Carver, a scientist he recruited […]
August 27, 2019
Different dreams in Atlanta, Georgia. A thread. Dreams of the Lost Cause: The images of Jefferson Davis, Robert E Lee, and Stonewall Jackson carved into Stone Mountain, Georgia. The top of Stone Mountain was infamously the site of the second foundation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. Statue of Mahatma Gandhi at the Martin […]
November 13, 2009
Even though Kim Il-Sung died in 1994, officially he is still the “Eternal President” of North Korea. So when official visitors call, they are expected to present not one but two gifts, one to Kim Il-Sung and the other to his son, the country’s current ruler, Kim Jong-Il. All of these gifts are reverently collected […]
October 16, 2009
The most tantalizing mystery about North Korea is its people. How do they live their lives, and what do they really think? Their belief system seems so alien, so isolated from all we know about the rest of the world, we wonder whether they have any sense of the disconnect or not – and if so, […]