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
Last-Minute Thoughts on Marine Le Pen
By the end of the day, journalists will at last be able to stop writing the same column about “the most unpredictable election ever” and the awful choices France confronts. Voting has begun. The first exit polls will be published when polling stations close at 8 p.m. They’re usually fairly accurate.
Featured
Guilty Men
Turkish democracy didn’t die all at once in last week’s referndum; it’s been languishing for years. Why did so many in the West fail to notice? On April 16, Turkish voters narrowly approved a referendum that replaced their country’s parliamentary democracy with an “executive presidency.”. Steven Cook, of the Council on Foreign Relations, was quick to pronounce modern Turkey dead.
The American Interest
Featured
The Closing of the Conservative Mind
Donald Trump won last year’s Republican civil war and most of the losers surrendered. A buffoonish and narcisistic reality TV star who spent his entire life as a boorish Democrat and who had nothing but contempt for the Republican Party and traditional American conservatism has managed, like a conquering warlord, to rally the vanquished around him.
World Affairs Daily
Featured
UNE TRAGÉDIE AMÉRICAINE
VANT MÊME LE RÉSULTAT DE L’ÉLECTION, TRUMP A MONTRÉ SA NOCIVITÉ EN DÉTRUISANT LES VALEURS CONSERVATRICES. À CAUSE DE SES ÉLANS XÉNOPHOBES, PROTECTIONNISTES, PROVINCIAUX ET AUTORITARISTES, LE PARTI RÉPUBLICAIN RESSEMBLE DÉSORMAIS À LA CARICATURE QU’EN FAISAIT LA GAUCHE.
Causeur
Featured
Who is Fethullah Gülen?
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, claims that a Muslim cleric living in rural Pennsylvania was the mastermind of a bloody, failed coup attempt in Turkey last Friday. The attempt saw the unprecedented horror of the Turkish military turning its arms against their own people and mowing them down in the street.
Featured
Barbarism Again in France
Last night, during festivities to celebrate Bastille Day in Nice, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel—only one terrorist has so far been identified—killed 84 people, including ten children, and left 18 more in critical condition. It was the seventh terrorist attack in France in 18 months. People had gathered on the popular Promenade des Anglais.
City Journal
Featured
For Europe, the Only Way Forward Is Together
I share Daniel Johnson’s concern about Europe’s future—although not always for the reasons he cites. In general, I believe he conflates Europe’s domestic pathologies with the effects on Europe of global events, not all of which are of Europe’s making and not all of which are as grave as he stipulates.
Featured
The Cold War’s Arab Spring: How the Soviets Created Today’s Middle East
Thus did botched decolonization result in endless instability. The most intractable of the regional conflicts to which this gave rise, that between the Arabs and Israelis, is attributed in this narrative to Israel’s unwillingness to accede to Palestinian national aspirations. Thus did the region become a breeding ground for radicalism, intensified by Cold War rivalry between the superpowers, who replaced the European colonizers as the region’s meddling overlords.
Tablet Magazine
Featured
Paris Is Worth a Mass
Is it right that Paris gets a mass rally while Boko Haram’s slaughter of thousands in Nigeria merits hardly a shrug? But it’s the response Paris and Nigeria both deserve. This is what civilization looks like. I strolled into the greatest terrorist bloodbath in Paris since the Nazis ran the city.
The American Interest
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
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
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
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
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

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 a contributing editor of City Journal, a fellow of the Manhattan Institute, a senior fellow for Turkey of the American Foreign Policy Council, and an editor and regular contributor at Ricochet.com.

I'm now working on a book called Brave Old World: Europe Revisited, a sequel to my first book about Europe, which was published ten years ago. This time, my reporting will be entirely funded by my readers: I'd be ever so grateful for your help.

www.gofundme.com/braveoldworld
www.berlinski.com
www.ricochet.com