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A Citizen’s Guide to Greece 2015
The Aftermath of Despair and a Cartography of Hope
You are cordially invited To a presentation of photographs by photojournalist Dimitris Bouras “Beyond Dichotomies: Reassembling Global Challenges through the Local: Syria / Iraq | Research Project | 1991, 2003 ~ 2007, 2010 ~ ...
The same language
By Alexia Apostolina A cloudy morning in November we woke up, dressed as warm as we could with a smile on our faces, bags with pullovers, raincoats and everything else we wanted to give to those people. Heroes. In the bus ev...
The Bourgeois of Calais
Le référendum a été un désastre : tels les bourgeois de Calais, Tsipras a dû se rendre à Bruxelles le 12 juillet avec un projet d’accord encore plus dur que celui qu’il avait soumis à référendum. It’s not an...
@#$% democracy
I first saw this illustration on Facebook early this past Monday morning, after I had read initial accounts in the Greek press on voter turnout in the September 20 general election. My first reflex was maybe to share it with aw...
The best and the brightest
In the spring of 2006 I invited Pavlos Geroulanos to visit the Dukakis Center to speak on the topic of “youth and politics.” At the time Geroulanos was something like chief of staff to the then-president of PASOK, G...
The Sacrifice of Iphigenia
Last year I published a Kindle e-book on the Greek sovereign debt crisis. I wanted to understand, and explain to non-Greek readers, why Greeks behaved as they had during the crisis, and why they might have acted other than an A...
Giving up the ghost
It was a metaphor that was not uncommon in earlier moments of the crisis, that of Greece as a patient on life support. The notion of a sick man of Europe has a long pedigree after all. It has come back with a vengeance now, mos...
Now comes the hard part
It was in the wee hours between November 4-5, 2008. The news was filtering in that Barack Obama had defeated John McCain in the US Presidential election. If you were a Republican, and had experienced George W. Bush’s hist...
Yes? No? Vote, and stay engaged
We have an expression in the US. “Vote early and often.” Lest you think I am encouraging you to commit voter fraud, I actually have something else in mind. If you vote when young you are likely to continue to want t...
Why serve?
By David Wisner I confess. I am a Europeanist and a self-conscious product of what we call the Western tradition. I dreamed as a teenager of studying in Florence, the Florence of the Italian Renaissance. I later came of age i...
Can do: entrepreneurship and public service
Prepared remarks by David Wisner for a round table on The Greek Startup Scene: bubble or future,” Thessaloniki Science Festival, May 15, 2015. Thank you, Michalis Stangos, for inviting me to speak on your panel. For the b...
The spirit of public service
By David Wisner For EF For the better part of the past decade and a half I have been searching for ways to translate the concept and practice of public service, so commonplace throughout the United States, into the contemporary...
Here’s to your health
I recently found myself obliged to spend some time in a public hospital. Aside from the obvious benefits to my health, it was a most revealing experience. Ihave no complaints about my treatment. The rather negative opinion I ha...
This not a pipe
On the TV news a few days ago Greek journalist Pavlos Tsimas suggested that the Greek government and several other EU member states, especially Germany, were engaged in a war of words. The next day Bloomberg said what Tsimas co...
Greek urban warriors
The Michael and Kitty Dukakis Center for Public and Humanitarian Service and Ianos Bookstore Cordially invite you to a presentation of Greek Urban Warriors: resistance and terrorism 1967-2014 by John Brady Kiesling Athens: Lyca...
The mandate, and other democratic myths
This past weekend the digital site of the French newspaper Le Monde ran an interesting story entitled, in translation, “The Greece that did not vote for Syriza.” I cannot say the piece was faultless, but Eliza Per...
Who wants to …?
Election day is nigh upon us. With this in mind, there are three dimensions to the question I have been thinking of asking: Who wants to run, who wants to vote, and who wants to govern. In May 2014 the Dukakis Center examined a...
We don’t get to choose these things
By David Wisner Armchair expert on the Greek sovereign debt crisis that I have portrayed myself to be, you can imagine my relative despondency having read Pavlos Eleftheriadis’ article on Greece’s oligarchs in a rec...
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