Putin’s brutal attack on Ukraine has turned the world on its head. As shocking as it is, those closer to Russia sense something familiar in the past three months. This personal dispatch is about the Russians and the Slavs (I am the latter).
Source: YONDER
Connecting global events into a new narrative.
Putin may seem an irrational actor, but he is clearly staging a wider war against the West and the U.S. Even if Russia couldn’t survive an urban guerrilla battle in Ukraine, it has China’s silent support.
An immigrant’s reflections on a dying city that is bound to be reborn.
Slovenian-born writer Andrej Mrevlje tries once again to get a read on the fiercely reserved first lady, this time with the help of new book called The Art of Her Deal.
Our Slovenian writer’s bygone trip through a China still not plugged into the global economy reveals some clues for how the pandemic has brought us to this point.
When a virus sucks all the oxygen out of the public space — and then another arrives.
WASHINGTON — During the coronavirus pandemonium, the voice of Slavoj Žižek is an essential one. The renowned Slovenian philosopher is there when you need him: decoding a mind-boggling event, explaining a new phenomenon that is shattering global society, connecting the dots, filling in loose ends, shedding light on the unknown. There isn’t anybody else on […]
Ahead of Super Tuesday’s crucial Democratic primaries, a look at the unlikely ‘broken clock’ frontrunner whose time seems to have finally come.
The author grew up in the city. On a recent trip back, he finds the Slovenian capital revitalized in a way he’d dreamed about during his youth.
I was not at Tiananmen those weeks in the spring 1989, when thousands of students occupied the square, demanding more room in a modernizing China. Nor was I there in those horrid hours between the third and fourth of June, when under the cover of night the People’s Liberation Army first surrounded the area, then […]
The center-right populist Italian government has recently bowed to Chinese flattery, announcing it was ready to sign a Memorandum of Understanding that will connect Rome and Beijing on a modern Silk Road. At the end of a long, slow path of decline and political confusion, Rome is in bad need of fresh investment to boost […]
How is it that analysis of the rising world power is reduced to an abstract notion from the field of genetics? Established experts on China are not looking at the future.
WASHINGTON — How long must you live, how strong must be your memory, to turn back and say: damn it, this world has really changed. Look at the millennials, they seem to be better educated than the boomers, but they are sui generis in their thinking, seemingly inspired and shaped by memes rather than historical […]
WASHINGTON — If you ever want to fly to America from Charles de Gaulle Airport, be sure that you are not landing in terminal 2F, as you might miss your flight, or even get arrested before reaching your point of departure, Terminal 1. But if you are starting your journey towards the U.S. from Charles […]
WASHINGTON — My first encounter with China was, oddly, at the top of the Empire State Building. I was a young student, and climbing to the top of the Manhattan landmark was the last thing I did before returning home from my first visit to the U.S., where I now live. I was not particularly […]
WASHINGTON — I loved Amazon when it first appeared. It was the 1990s, and I was living in Italy and then China, two countries that are strongly monolingual with a scarce number of foreign-language bookstores. Rome for instance, with three and a half million inhabitants at the time, had a couple of English bookstores and […]
WASHINGTON — On the night of the midterm elections, my wife and I organized an open house, inviting friends and people from all walks of life to watch the results. The TV was on, but instead of staring at the screen and following the constant predictions of electoral victories and losses, people were interacting and […]
Yonder’s Slovenian-born Andrej Mrevlje is also a part-time Uber driver in Washington. Oh, the people he meets.
The good, the bad, and the bizarre. Part-time Uber operator Andrej Mrevlje offers an honest, intimate take on what it’s like to work with the controversial ride-sharing platform.
Categories
Reading Tea Leaves In Pyongyang
WASHINGTON — When Kim Jong-un came out in the open, analysts, spies and all kind of experts were running through the footage, sound bites, testimonies, intelligence reports and open-source information collected during the few hours the North Korean dictator visited South Korea, Pyongyang’s staunch enemy since 1953. Since that year, not a single member of […]
In the age of Trump, there are innumerable issues and arguments that go unnoticed or underreported because this president is sucking up the oxygen of the entire American media universe, with his indecisive tweets and resulting indecisive policies. This is one of those topics that escaped the public eye. It centers around Trump’s announcement to […]
How our foreign-born author became an app in America’s capital city.
It will be marked in the historical record as the date when China took over control of Far East Asia.
-Essay- WASHINGTON — On Nov. 8, 2016, Erik Hagerman was struck by a bolt. Donald Trump was victorious, the last thing he wanted to hear. So on that very day, the 53-year-old former Nike corporate executive swore that he would avoid everything that happened in, and to, America after election day. He did not want […]
-Essay- WASHINGTON — As I was driving back to Washington last Christmas, I needed the navigation smartphone application Waze to get me out of Brooklyn, onto the Verrazano bridge, then across Staten Island into New Jersey, and finally to the I-95 highway that leads to DC. By the time I got on the New Jersey […]
The old, retired cardinal has had enough. He does not like what the Vatican is doing in China. He takes a plane and asks to be received by the pope. But instead of bringing it to an end, the encounter between the two men escalates the tensions around the Vatican’s pending agreement with China, a […]
Colorado was among the first states in the U.S. to decriminalize marijuana. Our European correspondent has a closer look.
Impeachment is coming, and other failed predictions.
Brutal evictions of poor migrants in Beijing’s outskirts are part of a long history of cynical control of the populace.
WASHINGTON — This is an elegant city. It is smooth and soft-spoken. It’s clean and well kept, possibly because most of the residential buildings in the city are family townhouses. Low, two, three-story buildings spread the city out, creating the impression Washington is bigger than it is. Sparse-density urbanity evokes the pastoral, idyllic way of […]
Apple has opened the doors of its new 175-acre campus, built in the shape of a gigantic UFO, where 12,000 employees will be working. It will cost Apple $5 billion – five times as much as NASA’s Juno, which traveled to Jupiter. Because of the design of the main building, the Apple Park has already […]
In May 1999, I visited North Korea. I was based at the time in Beijing as a correspondent for a Slovenian newspaper, and it was impossible not to visit the country that had aroused so many questions and offered so few answers. One just needed to see the place. So I did. I joined a […]
LJUBLJANA — I have been traveling for a few weeks now, on a journey filled with inner dialogue. Searching first for long-desired destinations, I was soon digging deep into my childhood. It was a walk toward the past — a backtrack of the images and sensations that were important in forming my personality. Doing it […]
NEW YORK CITY — The 19th-century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde defined the marketplace as a war between buyers and sellers. He called price “a truce” obtained by haggling. It was because of that “war” mentality, he explained in his Selected Papers, that authorities in Europe began fixing prices on goods and services. The goal was […]
-OpEd- WASHINGTON — Late last summer, my wife and I took a ferry from Doolin, on the West coast of Ireland, to Inishmore, the smallest of the three Aran Islands. The tiny ferry, with perhaps no more than 30 or 40 people aboard, was filled with mostly European passengers.The ocean was rough; a short trip […]
What Silvio Berlusconi’s 20-year hold on Italy tells those looking to bring down (as fast as possible) the marketing man occupying the White House.
WASHINGTON — The world seems to be stepping into a new era — literally. As if, all of a sudden, the Gregorian calendar is no longer valid and the world needs to start counting from the beginning. On January 20 of the year 2017, according to the old calendar, the new Trumpian calendar will start […]
WASHINGTON — Melania Trump (or Melania Knavs, as she was called before she married and moved into Trump Tower) will be the only first lady since 1829 to have been born outside the United States. John Quincy Adams’ wife, Louisa Adams, was the last, having been born in England when the U.S. was still a […]
Slovenian-born Andrej Mrevlje has lived all around the world, sharing his stories and ideas. Now, after five years in the Big Apple, it’s time for life inside the beltway.
Our itinerant Slovenian-born New Yorker takes a long-awaited voyage to the land of Joyce and good drink, and a certain singular brand of modesty.