I borrowed the title of today’s column from an old essay by the late Umberto Eco. The Western reaction to the Gülenist putsch attempt in Turkey last year made me go back to it.
“How dare you consider vacationing in Turkey with my children?” said a wife to her husband in the back of a Berlin taxi.
“There is something rotten in the state of Denmark” says Marcellus in the first act of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. Living in Ankara, I can relate to that.
In Aesop’s Fables, a group of mice get together to discuss how to rid themselves of the danger of the cat.
“People who love sausage and people who believe in justice should never watch either of them being made.” So said Otto von Bismarck, the great German statesman of the 19th century, according to legend.
The sudden embargo on Qatar by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates perplexed us all this month. It was a half-baked regional response to the half-baked American ideas presented during President Donald Trump’s recent visit
No wonder Elon Musk left his advisory role in the Trump White House
When I was in Kabul years ago, I was positively surprised to see a branch of the Agha Khan Foundation working on building a cellphone network.
The United States has a 3,300-km border with Mexico. President Donald Trump ran on a campaign promise to build a “big beautiful wall” along it, and though he seems less enthusiastic about it these days, he still hasn’t backed away from the project.
