Claire Berlinski

Writer, Researcher, and Journalist

Paris

Novelist, essayist, journalist, historian, travel writer, biographer, critic.

Claire Berlinski

Writer, Researcher, and Journalist

Paris

Novelist, essayist, journalist, historian, travel writer, biographer, critic.

Featured
Weimar Istanbul
The City grew rapidly, dwarfing in size and population any other in the country. The streets stimulated like cocaine; horns honked, crowds surged, nerves jangled. To step outside was to be electrified by the harlequinade of roaring colors, bright lights, rushing traffic. Transvestites prowled, thieves pickpocketed, and in the fashionable cafés, intellectuals smoked furiously and complained of their anomie.
City Journal
Featured
A Hidden History of Evil
In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps.
City Journal
Featured
The Indian Century?
I attended a dinner in Paris full of tech experts, scientists, and investors, all of whom were gloomy about the West. Progress isn’t progressing, they complained. There are too many impediments to innovation. What on earth has gone wrong with our universities? We once put a man on the moon, and now we can’t even figure out a humane way to fly from Silicon Valley to Paris.
City Journal
Featured
Civilization and the City of Light
Just before the attacks, my father had open-heart surgery at the Clinique Ambroise Paré in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly. A team of cardiological craftsmen cleaved his chest, separated his breastplate, mechanically circulated and oxygenated his blood, shut off his heart and lungs, cooled his heart, and stopped its beat.
City Journal
Featured
Assailing NATO, Trump joins Kremlin in war on the democratic world order
The United States has inexplicably undermined, if not destroyed, its relationship with Germany, the foundational relationship of the postwar world order and the reason the world has endured no great-power war since 1945. It did so not because of a great friction of strategic interests, but because the President attempted publicly to shake down the chancellor like a real estate contractor in New Jersey.
New York Daily News
Featured
Istanbul’s Crime Conundrum
I walk alone through almost every neighborhood of Istanbul, often at night. This is a megacity of at least 12 million people, many of whom are poor and three-quarters of whom are under 35. Income distribution is gravely unequal. I am nonetheless less afraid—much less afraid—that I will be a victim of violent crime here than I am when I walk through London, Paris, or any big American city.
City Journal
Featured
1 Million Dead in 30 Seconds
Seismic risk mitigation is the greatest urban policy challenge that the world confronts today. If you consider that too strong a claim, try to imagine another way in which bad urban policy could kill a million people in 30 seconds. Yet the politics of earthquakes are rarely discussed, and when discussed, widely misunderstood.
City Journal
Featured
Silencing the Djinns
Ali Ayhan is a shepherd in the ancient city of Hasankeyf, nestled between the Tigris River and the steep cliffs of the Tur Abdin Plateau in southeastern Turkey, about 65 miles from the Syrian and Iraqi borders. The waters of this river gave rise to the first settlements in Mesopotamia’s Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization.
City Journal
Featured
Rebelicious
It’s September, the sky is blue over the Communist suburbs of Paris, and revolutionary music is pumping from every speaker in Georges Valbon Park in La Courneuve. Someone was making a killing on Che Rebel Spirit energy drink, for which I developed a taste. It packed a big caffeine punch. The French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Français, or PCF) was holding its annual Fête de l’Humanité, a three-day bash to raise money for its daily newspaper.
City Journal
Featured
The Architectural Sacking of Paris
In 2014, Anne Hidalgo, protégée of Paris’s socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë, ran for his office, giving rise to her nickname, La Dauphine—“the heiress.”. Her conservative rival, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, became known as “the harpist,” after an unfortunate photo shoot in Paris Match, in which she posed gravid on a forest floor, like a woodland nymph, next to a harp twice her size.
City Journal
Featured
The Czarist image of mass shootings
Let’s retire the term ‘gun violence,’ or reserve it for jealous husbands who shoot their wives. What happened in El Paso is terrorism; more properly, it is a nihilist insurgency. We should pause to consider the origins of this phenomenon in late Czarist Russia, the cradle of modern terrorism. There is an eerie similarity between America’s shooter culture and the sinister and contagious form of violent nihilism that emerged between 1861 and 1866 in Russia.
Featured
The Problem with No Name
Claire Berlinski At the heart of the unrest in France is a blackout of rational thinking—and it’s driving the country to destruction. “We have now sunk to such a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” – George
The American Interest
Featured
France Doesn’t Have Enough Cops
The Gilets Jaunes say they can’t take it anymore. They’re not the only ones. Violent uprisings are a sign of public unhappiness. They are also a sign of state failure. France is hardly a failed state, nor will it be one. But it is exhibiting symptoms associated with state failure. It is struggling to maintain practical control of its territory.
The American Interest
Featured
Jupiter and Rambo
“Grotesque speculations” are crippling France when we need it most. Most Americans have not heard the name Benalla, and if they have, they haven’t a clue why it should concern them. How could they? The White House is a region of spacetime exerting such a strong pull on our attention that no one can escape; a scandal in France that sounds inscrutable and insignificant will not be the exception to the rule, even if it is neither.
The American Interest
Featured
Opinion Arm in Arm, Trump and Putin Are Pulling Europe Apart. The Consequences Will Be Catastrophic
America constructed and sustained a post-war Europe 'whole, free, and at peace,' a liberal order that allowed America itself to flourish. But a treacherous handshake in Helsinki could effectively wipe out 70 years of peace in Europe Chaos is inevitable wh
Featured
On the Eve of the NATO Summit, Trump Has Pissed Away the Pax Americana
Modern Europe—liberal, democratic Europe—is a creation of the United States. This story was once known to every American, but as the generation responsible for this achievement dies, it seems this knowledge is no longer passed down. The United States built the modern order upon an architecture of specific institutions: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the International Court of Justice.
The Daily Beast

About

Claire Berlinski

Writing novels

Writing essays

Journalism

Travel writing

Historical research

Writing biographies

Criticism

I'm an American novelist, freelance journalist, travel writer, biographer, historian, editor and consultant who lives amid a menagerie of adopted stray animals in Paris. I'm the author of There is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters. I'm also the author of Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's crisis is America's, Too, and two spy novels: Loose Lips and Lion Eyes. I'm the Editor-in-Chief of The Cosmopolitan Globalist, an online journal exploring the age of Caesarism and the global challenge to liberal democracy.

https://claireberlinski.substack.com