Empowerment Consumerism
Unlike the conspicuous consumption of the 1950s, what's important is not the thing itself, but your emotional relationship to buying it. It’s about process, not product, and the fact that, in the process, you end up with a whole lot of products is somehow beside the point . . . 
Cyprus’s Great Divide
From Alexander the Great to Henry Kissinger and beyond, the small eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus has been the pawn of greater forces . . .
The Persistence of Memory
Unlike the Berlin Wall, Cyprus’s Green Line traced a preexisting division, underscoring the linguistic, religious, and cultural fault lines that first caused the nation to buckle under ethnic fighting in 1963, and to rupture entirely in 1974 . . .
The Fall of the Berlin Wall
I had become accustomed to the strangeness of crossing the border—the long lines for the visa, the blank but prying stares of the border guards, the doors that open only from the Western side, as if all of East Berlin were being stored in a vault . . .
Orwell: The Life—D.J. Taylor
Orwell's dystopic vision has become the standard by which all governmental repression is measured . . .
The Iraq War Reader—Sifry & Cerf
What gradually becomes evident as one reads the book—like watching an island grow clearer in the fog as one approaches—is that the true motives for this war had less to do with Iraq’s military power than with the United States’ . . .
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