A miracle happened at Losh cafe in Dilijan a few days ago. I ordered a cup of coffee in Armenian. The barista called out to me in English a few minutes later, "Your coffee is ready..." then stopped herself and started over in Armenian, "Dzer surchy patrast e." (Ձեր սուրճը պատրաստ է։) I am calling this miraculous because...
This online discussion took place April 7, 2023 with students of the Ayn Rand Center of Armenia (https://www.facebook.com/ARCArmenia/). It focuses on the content of Gregory V. Diehl's (https://www.gregorydiehl.net/) book, Everyone Is an Entrepreneur: Selling Economic Self-Determination in a Post-Soviet World, which was recently translated into...
"There is some part of your brain that insists that the cost of being wrong is infinite and another part of your brain that insists that the cost of missing an opportunity is zero. The truth is nearly the opposite."
In the Armenian short film Red Apples (free to watch on Vimeo), the mother of the groom loses her mind when, the morning after her son's wedding, she fails to find bloodstains on the sheets of their marital bed. Blood, of course, would normally be the result of a virginal bride's hymen breaking on the night of her wedding...
For the last month, Azerbaijani "environmentalist protestors" have been blocking the Lachin corridor, the only road going in or out of Nagorno-Karabkh (Artsakh), preventing supplies, medical services, and human movement in or out of the disputed region with limited exceptions.
"I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable. Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things."
In the three years that I've been living in Kalavan, I've seen three English teachers come to the village and work with the children at the school as part of the Teach for Armenia program. Each stayed one year, and the same pattern has repeated in a strikingly similar manner.
Releasing Everyone Is an Entrepreneur was both a cathartic exercise and something of a social experiment for me. It served as a way to see if I could make real progress in the economic paradigm of a part of the world I was now connected to and that, in my perspective, desperately needed it. But over three years of living...
