In Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk often explores the line between person and place. He clearly believes living in Istanbul has deeply impacted who he is and how he writes:
Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul — these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, and even civilizations. Their imaginations were fed by exile, a [...]

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Earlier, I handpicked a few quotes from Robert Kaplan’s Eastward to Tartary that offered insight into today’s geopolitical situation, even though they were written nearly a decade ago. I’d like to share one more.
While Israel’s security phobia might at times seem extreme, life in Israel taught me that the liberal-humanist tendancy to see politics primarily [...]

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One of the interesting things about reading a non-fiction book about current events nearly ten years after the book was originally published is that you have the opportunity to check the author’s analytical ability. Anyone can say anything about the future. But once the future becomes the past, well, then we get to argue about [...]

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Traveling alone is nice, but at first it is also scary and intimidating.

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