Center for Strategic Communication

Potemkin’s Village: Alive and Well in Sochi

By Patricia H Kushlis I must admit I quite enjoyed the Russian propaganda show that opened the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics Friday night.  Russians have been extraordinarily adept at story-telling for seemingly forever and staging extravaganzas –first religious then...

The Black Swan Effect and the Course of History

By Patricia H Kushlis In the New York Times best seller The Black Swan:  the Impact of the Highly Improbable  (Random House 2010) its author Nassim Taleb argues that what we don’t know is likely to be far more relevant that what we do particularly with respect to...

A Glimpse of What Could Be Lost in Timbuktu

By Patricia Lee SharpeTimbuktu, for most Westerners, is simply another word for the end of the world.  Today, in fact, it’s a somewhat decayed real city on the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Once upon a time, however, Timbuktu was a vital commercial and cultural...