I’m back

Hey all — sorry to leave you without any blogging for the last month. The beginning of the academic year happened, along with a crush of other deadlines. I’m back. And a lot sure has happened while I’ve been gone — Israel and the Palestinians resolved the impasse over a settlement freeze and resumed talks, ...

Hey all -- sorry to leave you without any blogging for the last month. The beginning of the academic year happened, along with a crush of other deadlines. I'm back. And a lot sure has happened while I've been gone -- Israel and the Palestinians resolved the impasse over a settlement freeze and resumed talks, and… oh wait, that didn't happen. Well, Iraq now has a government… what? Oh, um, well at least we've made progress in our nuclear talks with Iran. Wait, they haven't yet even said whether they'll show up for the talks next month? Hosni Mubarak's still around? Gaza still under blockade? Hamas and Fatah still haven't reconciled? At least the unjustly imprisoned Bahraini internet forum leader Ali Abdulemam has finally been released… oh, that didn't happen either. Okay then.

Hey all — sorry to leave you without any blogging for the last month. The beginning of the academic year happened, along with a crush of other deadlines. I’m back. And a lot sure has happened while I’ve been gone — Israel and the Palestinians resolved the impasse over a settlement freeze and resumed talks, and… oh wait, that didn’t happen. Well, Iraq now has a government… what? Oh, um, well at least we’ve made progress in our nuclear talks with Iran. Wait, they haven’t yet even said whether they’ll show up for the talks next month? Hosni Mubarak’s still around? Gaza still under blockade? Hamas and Fatah still haven’t reconciled? At least the unjustly imprisoned Bahraini internet forum leader Ali Abdulemam has finally been released… oh, that didn’t happen either. Okay then.

Now that I’m coming back online, I’m planning to tweak the format here a bit. Since we launched the Middle East Channel in March I’ve been struggling with the appropriate balance between my personal blog here and the longer essays which we feature over there. I’ve generally opted to limit myself to the longer essays which could be cross-posted to the Channel, while restricting my short comments to Twitter. But I find that I miss old-school blogging. So I’m going to experiment with going back to posting more of those quick-hitting posts here on my personal blog, while continuing to cross-post longer essays to the Middle East Channel. We’ll see how that works out. In the meantime, apologies for my absence and I welcome me back to my blog!

Marc Lynch is associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, where he is the director of the Institute for Middle East Studies and of the Project on Middle East Political Science. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. He is the author of The Arab Uprising (March 2012, PublicAffairs).

He publishes frequently on the politics of the Middle East, with a particular focus on the Arab media and information technology, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, and Islamist movements. Twitter: @abuaardvark

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