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Author Archives: James Thomas Snyder
UPDATE: The Price of Promotion – Diversity and Retention
This is a follow-up to my earlier article, “The Price of Promotion,” which criticized the U.S. Foreign Service promotion system. The following analysis is based on the Department of State Bureau of human Resources “Foreign Service Promotion Statistics by Cone, … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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The Price of Promotion
The State Department’s employee evaluation process is worse than terrible. It is no better than a gamble. Consider this career choice: you are a second-tour FS-04 consular officer serving your country in an American embassy abroad. You have tenure, which … Continue reading
The Cost of Lies
On April 26, 1986, Reactor #4 at a Soviet nuclear power station in northern Ukraine exploded. As with almost everything in Soviet history, that is about all anyone can agree on, but it was enough. The worst nuclear accident on … Continue reading
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2 Comments
The Secret History of Small Mercies
The most devastating scene in The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2007 film about the East German Stasi, comes near the end when the playwright, played by Sebastian Koch, pulls the wire taps out of his walls of … Continue reading
Tool of the trade
This is an L.C. Smith and Corona Company Standard Typewriter in the collection of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. It is a training model for children: instead of letters printed on the keys, illustrations of animals correspond with … Continue reading
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Belief from the inside out
Carla Power’s Pulitizer Prize-shortlisted If the Oceans Were Ink, an outsider’s meditation on The Holy Qur’an with the help of a learned Islamic scholar, signals a subtle but seismic shift in our intellectual world. It joins other unmistakable indications that mostly secular Western … Continue reading
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Politics and Political Theory, Public Diplomacy, Uncategorized
Tagged Books, Carla Power, faith, interfaith, Islam, Muslims, politics, Qur'an, religion, Umma
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Why I Love Comic Strips
This comic strip, a Sunday installment of Peanuts by Charles Schulz, ranks as my favorite above all others. I can’t explain why. Maybe it’s the incredibly loaded conversations that don’t seem to go anywhere or resolve themselves. Maybe it’s the … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged berkeley breathed, bloom county, calvin and hobbes, charles schulz, comic strips, Doonesbury, garry trudeau
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Joan Didion, Californian
Joan Didion seized my attention early, before I wrote for myself. Assigned “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” in high school, I read with amazement her cool, detached descriptions of things I recognized growing up in California. I graduated quickly to “The White … Continue reading
The Power of Babel
For most of the last nine months I have had the extraordinary benefit of intensive foreign language training. I had resources, faculty, structure and time all to my benefit: online and computer resources, a diverse faculty from many countries to learn different … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged China, Chinese, Cultural Diplomacy, Facebook, foreign language, language, language acquisition, Public Diplomacy
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What matters most
A recent opinion article by Roger Cohen about a book and polling data demonstrating a gulf in transatlantic public opinion struck me as a windy but representative example of the unnecessary polarization in our political debate. We find more visceral examples of this bifurcated outrage … Continue reading
