Agatha Christie: The Mystery Maven Who Traveled the World

Culture, Europe, Middle East, Travel

Chances are, wherever you travel, you’ll find an Agatha Christie paperback. With eighty detective novels and story collections to her credit, Christie’s work has been translated into 130 languages and ranks third in sales behind the Bible and Shakespeare. She loved nothing more than going away and was utterly fearless about trying new destinations. Of her “foreign travel books,” she later would write, “if detective novels are escape literature, the reader can escape to sunny skies and blue water as well as to crime in the confines of an armchair.”

Airport Lounges

Business, Middle East

Turkish Airlines Lounge in Istanbul is the Best Reason to Arrive at the Airport Early By Peter Greenberg In the world of airline consolidation, mergers, and failures, it’s easy to argue that competition has suffered, and along with it customer service. That can often be an easy argument to make in the U.S. Then there’s…

Meme Wars

America, Middle East

Meme Wars By David DeVoss In the years between 9/ll and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants publicized Al Qaeda’s beliefs, demands and atrocities with a succession of crudely produced audio and videotapes sent to Al Jazeera and other networks. By March 2004, however, the way that news and ideas…

God Save Kurdistan

Middle East, Middle East & Africa

God Save the Kurds Kurdistan prospers despite enveloping terror by David DeVoss Iraq’s Kurds are surrounded. To the West lie the Great Syrian Desert and the savagery of the Islamic State. North across the mountains an arc of enmity extends from Turkish Anatolia deep into the valleys of ancient Persia. Beyond the oil-rich province of…