Joshua Kucera

Photos from Mexico

This isn't really work-related, but I was on vacation in Mexico a couple months ago, and have some photos. And the site needs a little more color now, so check them out:

Merida

Merida

Valladolid

 

Campeche

Blogging again

Since I ended my last long trip in 2007, I haven't been blogging. But I'm back in the saddle and blogging at a new startup, True/Slant. It's just started up, and kinks are still being worked out, but you can get in on the ground floor now.

My blog is called New World Order, and once I start traveling again it will become a travel blog somewhat like what I had here before. But for now it is my thoughts on international affairs, geopolitics and America's future in the world, focused somewhat on a project I'm working on involving Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela. Check it out, and send feedback.

This site, however, will still be the place to look for new stories I'm publishing.

And finally, check out the inspiration for the name of the new blog, Ministry's classic 1993 song, New World Order (crappy ad in the beginning):

Watch more Cool World (Original Soundtrack) videos on AOL Video

How to build a new energy economy, and still hunt caribou - The Boston Globe

I have a Q&A with the foreign minister of Greenland in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe today:

GREENLAND, A SPARSELY populated, ice-covered island in the Arctic Ocean, has for most of its history been a place where events move at a glacial pace. But lately things in Greenland have been heating up, literally and figuratively: Its traditional economy of subsistence hunting and fishing has become one of the first casualties of global warming, which has disrupted animal migrations and melted the ice needed for dog sledding. And the same climate change is also opening up exploration of potential oil and mineral reserves that many expect will make its 56,000 people vastly wealthy. The world's largest island, almost a synonym for sleepy remoteness, is facing a transformation that could make it one of the biggest geopolitical hot spots of the 21st century, the Kuwait of the Arctic.

Read the rest here.

Crimean Tatars Are the Wild Card of the Region - Slate

The third installment in the Slate Ukraine series is out:

BAKHCHISARAY, Ukraine—The stone minarets of the 15^th-century Khan's Palace that dominate the skyline here, a city of about 50,000 a 30-minute bus ride south from Simferopol, are a reminder that while today Ukraine and Russia are jousting over Crimea, for most of the past millennium, another group ruled the peninsula: the Crimean Tatars. Muslims and speakers of a language closely related to Turkish, the Crimean Tatars are the descendants of the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan who settled here in the 13^th century. Their historical legacy is nearly invisible today, systematically destroyed first by the czars and then the Soviets.

But the Tatars, improbably, have revived themselves and are once again political players in Crimea. They are no longer the rulers, but as a politically active minority, they could act as the wild card in an eventual conflict over Crimea.

The whole thing is here.