Showing results by narrator "Kevin Stillwell" in All Categories

When Iran makes headlines, it is usually as a result of its conflicts with other countries. Far less attention is paid to Iran’s conflicts with itself, which are still raging nearly 40 years after the revolution that brought forth the Islamic Republic. Despite the images of a monolithic, repressed, hyper-devout society that sometimes serve as a shorthand for Iran in Western media, the country is in fact the site of a great deal of political and ideological contestation.

As a teenager, Jill Shannon fell victim to her stepfather's cruel abuse. Now, as an adult, Jill's made it - she has a successful career and a solid, if not static, marriage to Detective Alex Shannon. Together they live out what seems to be a perfect life in Seattle. The vow she made as a teenager to never again be a victim lies dormant - until one day a reporter lures her to his hotel room under the pretense of an interview - and suddenly it all comes rushing back.

U.S. willingness—and ability—to sustain the international order are now in question. Yet the United States will remain the world’s leading military power for decades, and its role in stabilizing the world may be now more important than ever.

Recovering from Workplace PTSD is divided into four sections, from self-discovery to recovery. Some of the sections may be more relevant to you and your situation than others. You can dip in wherever you like because each section stands alone.

Set in San Francisco and North Carolina, the linked stories in Damn Love introduce us to characters struggling with love in all its complicated forms, including a young doctor getting over a breakup with the help of a patient, a newly married gay man who reconnects with his estranged mother, a trio of physicists caught in a surprising love triangle, and a soldier who takes secrets with her to the Iraqi desert.

It's been years since Harrison Raines set foot in Richmond. Although a proud Virginian, he fled the South before the Civil War, unable to bear the evil of slavery. In 1862, battles rage on all sides of the Confederate capital, but Raines is not here as a soldier - he comes as a spy. Union intelligence, led by the formidable Allen Pinkerton, has sent him to steal the plans for a rumored Confederate superweapon: a seagoing ship clad entirely in iron that could break the Union blockade and turn the war around.

Jimmy Joste was a powerhouse in the oil and gas industry, but he was a weakling when it came to his gorgeous, athletic, longtime lover, Rhonda Glover. Addicted to her sexual prowess and madly in love, Joste gave her homes, cars, cash, and a $350,000 engagement ring. Their 15 years of passion and excess ended the day Rhonda drove directly from a shooting range to the Austin home they once shared. After pumping 10 bullets into him from a Glock 9mm, she stood over Joste's blood-splattered body and shot him six more times, twice below the waist.

Sam seems like an ordinary guy. While he is filling up his car with gas at a Stamford, Connecticut, station, a car whips into the station lot, stops alongside, and asks him for directions to LaGuardia airport. Gian claims that he is from Milan, but Sam can spot an imitation in a second. The "Italian's" accent is all wrong, and when he tries to sell him counterfeit luxury coats that he can't take back on the plane to Italy, they bump hips. And Sam feels that Gian has a gun tucked into his belt.

Despite boasting the most powerful economy on earth, the United States too often reaches for the gun instead of the purse in its foreign policy. The country has hardly outgrown its need for military force, but over the past several decades, it has increasingly forgotten a tradition that stretches back to the nation’s founding: the use of economic instruments to accomplish geopolitical objectives, a practice we term “geoeconomics.”


Almost as soon as the financial crisis struck in late 2007, policy-makers began working to prevent another one. The roots of the crisis, they contended, lay in reckless lending and excess debt. Banks had made massive loans to “subprime” borrowers, who had little ability to repay them, and the banks funded these investments with borrowed money. When the US housing bubble burst, millions of Americans defaulted on their mortgages, and the overleveraged banks collapsed.

With US hegemony waning and no successor waiting to pick up the baton, the current international system will likely give way to a larger number of power centers acting with increasing autonomy. The post-Cold War order is unraveling, and it will be missed.

Over the past three millennia, China has made three attempts to project its economic pow-er westward. The first began in the second century BC, during the Han dynasty, when China’s imperial rulers developed the ancient Silk Road to trade with the far-off residents of Central Asia and the Mediterranean basin; the fall of the Mongol empire and the rise of European maritime trading eventually rendered that route obsolete.

Five years after the brutal slaying of her husband, software technology executive Jill Shannon is finally ready to take the next step in her life. With her wedding to Phoenix Arizona prosecuting attorney Conner Manning just eight weeks away, the only cloud on Jill's horizon is her future father-in-law's political ambitions for his son. Jill has dark secrets in her past. Secrets she can't afford to have exposed under the relentless lights of a political campaign.

GB Road, New Delhi’s red-light district, is one of India’s largest, with an estimated 5,000 sex workers living in 96 brothels. It is also one of the nation’s oldest, having been established by the British in the 1930s.

Set in middle America during the economic hard times of the Nixon era, this tragicomic, epistolary masterpiece chronicles everything Andrew Whittaker - literary journal editor, negligent landlord, and aspiring novelist - commits to paper over the course of four critical months. From his letters, diary entries, and fragments of fiction, to grocery lists and posted signs, we find our hero hounded by tenants and creditors, harassed by a loathsome local arts group, tormented by his ex-wife, and living on a diet of fried Spam, cupcakes, and Southern Comfort.

One hundred and fifty years after publication, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace still sheds light on the tensions that structure Moscow’s relations with other great powers, and in particular with the United States.

The anger of less educated white voters in rural and exurban areas that Trump tapped into so effectively has been building for half a century. Its roots lie in Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” and only by understanding the mistakes made in that war can politicians hope to heal the country’s wounds.

Entrepreneurs drive innovation and dynamism, which in turn drive growth. So our lead package explores entrepreneurialism today - what it involves, what it accomplishes, and what can be done to spur and profit from it.

On January 30, after word got out that a large number of U.S. State Department officials were preparing a formal, well-argued dissent against President Donald Trump’s cruel executive order on immigration, the White House reacted with stung indignation. Even before the cable was submitted by an astonishing total of nearly a thousand State Department staffers, Trump’s spokesman, Sean Spicer, issued an extraordinary rebuke to the professional diplomats.

We are moving beyond a natural skepticism regarding expert claims to the death of the ideal of expertise itself. This is a bad thing. If trust in experts dissipates, expertise will serve not the public interest, but the interest of whatever clique is paying its bills. And such an outcome is already perilously near.