Christian Caryl

A History of Assassinations

Back from the Cold

Few rival le Carré when it comes to the craft of storytelling. He mines the stuff of politics with an ease and vitality that others can only envy.

Tillerson's Two Futures

What does it mean when the man chosen to run the State Department, Rex Tillerson, has no experience in government but ample experience doing business with dictators of every stripe?

The Kurds Are Nearly There

The dream of a national homeland is one that all Kurds share, wherever they currently live.

The Force of Nostalgia

My Star Wars

I can still remember how the initial moments of Star Wars bowled us over: the slow, vanishing-point text crawl that gave way to the descent, from the top of the frame, of the impossibly enormous imperial star cruiser. The opening amounted to a sort of visual manifesto.

Change in Burma

“Change” is a word that crops up in many conversations in Burma these days. One hopes Aung San Suu Kyi can successfully overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of the transformation her voters want.

The Bombs in Boston

Saving Alan Turing from His Friends

What ‘The Imitation Game’ gets wrong

Getting Alan Turing Wrong

The Imitation Game not only fatally miscasts the mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing as a character—it also completely destroys any coherent telling of what he and his colleagues were trying to do.

The Small Sects Under Fire

Putin: During and After Sochi

Why Sochi?

Why would Vladimir Putin want to host the Olympics in an underdeveloped place where terrorists lurk nearby? The answer is not as complicated as it may seem.

The Bombers’ World

Tracking Down 'Misha'

One of the more clouded aspects of the Boston bombings is the tale of “Misha,” a mysterious US-based Islamist who has been accused of radicalizing Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two alleged bombers. Today I was able to meet and interview “Misha.”

Invisible Iraq

The war in Iraq has had a profound and divisive effect on America’s national culture and yet remains, paradoxically, absent from our collective experience. For the nation that waged it, it was the invisible war, a conflict that came into focus only intermittently, and even then, without the immediacy with which previous generations lived through conflicts in Vietnam and Korea.

Islamist Déjà Vu

The year 1979—when Iranian student revolutionaries stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took dozens of American diplomats hostage, and Muslim radicals in Saudi Arabia, a staunch US ally, brazenly laid siege to the Grand Mosque in Mecca—marked the debut of a new political phenomenon known as “Islamism.” Perhaps it’s helpful to recall the events of that year as we contemplate the tragic death of US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and the storming of American diplomatic buildings in Cairo, Sanaa, Tunis, and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Once again, a growing political force from within the Islamic world—one of which Westerners were only dimly aware—has dramatically and violently demonstrated its capacity to shape global politics.

Burmese Days

Burma is a changed country, but the story is a long way from over

North Korea’s Not-So-Simple Succession

The Kim is dead. Long live the Kim. That, at least, is the story you’ll get from most of the initial takes on the death of Kim Jong Il, whose death was announced Monday around noon, Korean time. His designated political heir, his son Kim Jong Un, is now set to take the reins. That, at least, is how it’s supposed to happen according to the peculiar rules of the world’s only communist monarchy. After all, isn’t the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea a staunchly totalitarian state where nothing ever changes? Actually, no. You could have gotten away with writing that just a few years ago. But too much has happened in North Korea in the interim.

The Specter of Nuclear Drones