Djibouti has a strategic location, an excellent deep water port on the Red Sea, and a relatively poor population. Much of the nation’s land is salt flats. When I last took a look at Djibouti, it was in the form of a mystery adventure set at the port. This time, the story is different. Beau… [Read More]
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Armenia: The Sandcastle Girls
One of my sorority sisters was Armenian, and she talked about being Armenian a lot. She was involved in different Armenian cultural groups off campus, and her formal dates were always fellow members. I was kind of like, whatever, it’s nice that she’s interested in the country of her ancestry, but it’s also kind of… [Read More]
Azerbaijan: The Orientalist
I was searching for books about Azerbaijan and skipped over the country’s most famous novel, Ali and Nino: A Love Story, because I didn’t know it was the country’s most famous novel. I was worried about getting stuck with some dreck. Then I saw that The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East… [Read More]
Antarctica: A Year On Ice
Antarctica isn’t a country, but I am writing about it anyway. My blogging challenge, my rules, right? Antarctica A Year On Ice is a documentary about life in Antartica over the winter. The continent has about 4,000 residents in the summer season, peaking in December – February, and roughly 1,000 people the rest of the… [Read More]
Kenosha and Life in Fly-Over Country
Midwestern writer Twitter was really salty about a story that ran recently in Harper’s about Kenosha. Harper’s is a prestige magazine, and many writers would love the opportunity to have a clip from it. But the editors are sometimes clueless about the rest of the world. The Midwest is strangely misunderstood, dismissed as flyover land… [Read More]
