The Writing Maven

I'm not German. I've never lived there. So take this for what it is — one person watching from the outside, trying to make sense of a country that used to be the answer to a question nobody asks anymore. When I was growing up, Germany was the example. The country that got it right. Strong unions, decent wages, a safety net that actually caught you, an economy that made things the world wanted to buy. If you wanted to know what a working social market economy looked like, you pointed at Germany. Now I read the poverty reports and I don't recognize the place. 13.3 million people are officially poor. 16.1 percent of the population. The highest in five years. And before anyone says "well poverty is relative" — let me say what that actually means. It means you have less than 1,446 euros a month if you live alone. It means your kids don't get new shoes when the old ones wear out. It means you skip dinner so they don't have to. It means you're one broken wash...

Moscow is hitting Ukraine's grid before winter and leaning on discounted oil to keep the cash flowing. But every weapon it picks up is turning into a liability. I keep coming back to the timing. You don't hit power plants and substations in October and November because that's when they're most vulnerable militarily. You hit them then because that's when it hurts ordinary people the most. No heat. No water. No elevators. Hospitals running on generators. It's not really a battlefield tactic. It's a bet. A bet that Ukrainians will get tired and Europeans will get squeamish before Moscow runs out of men and money and missiles. And the oil side is the same logic. Russia can't outproduce the West. It can't out-bank it. So it does the next best thing — it keeps the crude flowing to India, China, Turkey, anyone who will take a discount, through this shadow fleet and this maze of middlemen that are hard to track and harder to sanction. The point isn't to ...

  The more I sit with this China story, the more it feels like the headline is trying to say two opposite things at once — that China is slowing down, and that China is still holding all the cards. And honestly, both are true. That's what makes it so maddening to read. Take the 4.3% number. In most countries, you'd take that and run. In China, it reads like a warning light.  The property market is still broken. Local governments are buried in debt. Young people can't find decent work. And regular households — they're just sitting on their money. Not because they're rich, but because they're scared. Scared about their job, about what their apartment is actually worth, about what happens if someone gets sick, about whether their kid will have it better. When people feel like that, they don't go out and spend. They hoard.  So domestic demand stays weak, and the whole economy has to lean harder on the same two crutches: exports and state spending. That's not...

I keep going back to that passenger manifest from Riyadh. Four Saudis. Two Bangladeshis. One American. One Egyptian. One Jordanian. One Syrian. One Palestinian. One Sudanese. Twelve people. Seven countries. One terminal at King Khalid International. Same minute. Same blast. 309 injured, some still critical, some probably will not make it through the week. I keep reading the list because I can't get past how ordinary it is. How unimportant these people were supposed to be. In the best sense of that word. Not soldiers. Not a base. Not a ministry building. Travelers. If you've ever been in that airport you know what that hall looks like. Low light, too cold from the AC, that smell of coffee and cleaning fluid. People dragging suitcases with busted wheels. Kids asleep on backpacks. Workers in line to go home to Dhaka after a two-year contract. An American contractor probably in a polo shirt, laptop bag. A Palestinian with a transit visa trying to get to somewhere that will let him ...

I was in my kitchen this morning. Coffee going cold on the counter, phone in my hand, scrolling. And I had that feeling again — the one I keep having lately. None of this adds up unless you stop believing the old story. The old story was that America led by building things that lasted. Alliances. Trust. Showing up for your friends even when it cost you something. At least pretending there was a difference between us and the strongmen we were always warning everyone about. But look at the headlines this week. It doesn't read like a superpower. It reads like a pawn shop. New visa bonds for people from dozens of countries. You want to come here to see your kid, to close a deal, to attend a wedding? Put money down first. Prove you’ll leave. More carrier groups to the Middle East. Always more ships. Trade deals that, if you read the fine print, still have Russian diesel floating around in them. And then the big one — a trade truce with China pushed all the way to early 2027. Convenientl...

There's something about the way we consume the news that has been bothering me for a long time. Some wars become impossible to ignore. They're on our phones when we wake up, on television during dinner, and all over social media. We see the same images every day. We learn the names of cities, recognise the faces of leaders and start to feel like we're watching history unfold in real time. Then there are wars happening at the same moment that barely get a mention. And I keep asking myself why. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the world recorded 61 active armed conflicts involving at least one state in 2024, the highest number since its records began in 1946. Eleven of those conflicts reached the threshold of war, meaning at least 1,000 battle-related deaths in a year. Nearly 160,000 people died in organised violence during 2024. <Cite refs={["turn458724search2"]}/> That's a staggering amount of suffering. Yet most of us couldn't name ev...

International law isn't equally enforced. It's enforced against whoever can't resist it. And pretending otherwise doesn't fix the problem. There's a question I keep coming back to whenever I read the news about international law. Why is it that some people can be accused of the most serious crimes in the world and still carry on as if nothing has happened, while others end up in court, in prison, or fighting for their lives? I've been thinking about it while following the stories about the ICC, the sanctions, the arrest warrants and the deals being made behind closed doors. And the more I look at it, the harder it becomes to ignore an uncomfortable reality. International law is supposed to apply to everyone. But the ability to enforce it often depends on how much power someone has to resist it. I know that sounds cynical. And I don't want this to become one of those arguments where we shrug our shoulders and say the whole system is corrupt, so there's no...

  So let me get this straight. For three years the US has been telling everyone that buying Russian oil helps pay for Putin’s war in Ukraine. It put sanctions on Russia, pushed price caps, and leaned on other countries to stop buying Russian energy. The message was simple: don’t hand Russia money it can spend on the war. Now Trump has announced a deal to buy Russian diesel. It starts at more than 300,000 metric tonnes, with another 500,000 in November and a million more after that. The US Treasury has also issued a temporary waiver allowing Russian diesel imports until April 7. I read that twice, because I figured I’d missed something. The timing makes it worse. Last month Trump signed a big sanctions law aimed at Russia’s energy revenues, the same revenues that fund the war. Now there’s a deal that goes the other way. One month. That’s how long it took for the message to fall apart. Zelenskyy was angry, and fair enough. He warned that handing Putin concessions like this won’t ...

  I've been trying to write about this story, but every time I come back to it, I get stuck on the same detail. The child. Last Thursday, during visiting hours at El Castillo prison in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, a fight broke out. By the time it was over, nine inmates and one visitor were dead. Sixteen other prisoners were taken for medical treatment. Then I read that one of the people killed was a two-year-old boy. And suddenly, all the numbers felt different. The boy had come to the prison with his father. His father survived. His son didn't. A two-year-old. At a prison. During visiting hours. He was there to see someone. Maybe he was too young to understand where he was or what was happening around him. Maybe, to him, it was just another visit with family. We'll probably never know what his last moments were like. And honestly, I don't know if I want to imagine them. I just keep thinking about how a child that small ended up being one of the victims of prison violence. He di...

I read about the sanctions on a Saturday. Then I went on with my day. Bought groceries, did the laundry, watched a show without really watching it. Everything was normal, except this one thought that just wouldn't leave me alone. It wasn't even anger at first. It was more a feeling that something was deeply wrong, and I couldn't quite put it into words. The US Treasury had sanctioned the International Criminal Court. Not just a judge or a prosecutor, but the institution itself. And when an institution is hit with sanctions like these, even basic things can become difficult. Banking, paying salaries, buying software, keeping the organization running. Suddenly, doing ordinary work becomes a problem. The ICC is based in The Hague and has 125 member states. The United States isn't one of them. And I think that's an important detail. I also want to get the facts right because it's easy to get carried away when something makes you angry. The ICC issued arrest warrants...