What lessons can the Eastern Mediterranean's once-cosmopolitan cities teach us about our strife-torn present? Between the 1800s and 1950s, the Levant's port cities were beacons of trade and French-style Westernisation, writes Athanasiadis [AFP]On a recent trip to Alexandria, I bumped into a Greek author of Alexandrian origins at a quaint waterfront patisserie. Over the course of our conversation, it became clear that unlike the majo...

Update: The full video of Peter Thiel’s speech is available here. Please refer to the video for exact quotes. On August 1, Peter Thiel published an op-ed on similar themes in The New York Times. I took notes on my phone, so any mistakes are mine. These notes should be treated as paraphrases and not as direct quotes, since I was not able to write everything down, and I have added context. I did not record audio, since when I asked in...