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On Tuesday, October 2 the lights in Sanaa went out.*  The power cut in the Yemeni capital wasn’t particularly surprising.  Yemen has been suffering rolling blackouts for years; a problem […]
Who won big in last night’s election? Data. Cold, hard data and the analytical tools to interpret it. The Obama campaign won by leveraging unbelievably detailed information about voters, as […]
Earlier today an apparent US drone strike targeted and killed ‘Adnan al-Qadhi in the area of Sanhan, just south of Sanaa. I say apparent drone strike, because while there is […]
There are a lot of nightmare scenarios when it comes to the Middle East.  Some of these are already visible on the horizon as the New York Times outlines in […]
I was reading a 1937 essay in which the author made casual mention of the problem of “morganatic marriage.” I’d never heard this term before.  I figured it might be […]
The 2012 election is officially over, and it was glorious. Barack Obama and the Democrats have delivered what one of our elder statesmen once referred to as “a thumping” to […]
I will do my level best not to turn this site into a constant stream of book promos and the like in my transparent attempt to sell copies – I’ll […]
            If you look east from most places in Seattle, you can see majestic Mt. Rainier looming tall and snow covered 80 miles to the west. Mt. Rainier is not […]
Today Foreign Policy published the first excerpt from The Last Refuge. The piece is largely drawn from Chapter 13 of the book, entitled Policy Shift: Here is the opening as […]