Suzy Hansen, "From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan" (FSG, 2026)

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Welcome to the New Books Network.

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Hello, and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Reuben Silverman, and with me today is Susie Hanson. Susie Hanson lived in Istanbul for more than a decade, working as a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and many other publications. Her first book, notes in a Horn Country, An American Abroad in a Post American World, was published in 2017. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction and the winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award. Her second book, which we will be discussing today, is From Life, Turkey, Istanbul and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erelon. It was published in April 2026 by Macmillan. Now, in addition to talking about your book, I want to start by asking you a little bit about your own background. What brought you to Turkey and why? What led you to stay there for almost a decade?

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Well, I had no connection to Turkey whatsoever. Actually, when I moved there, I was living in New York. I was working as a journalist at New York Publications, but I had always been interested in war and conflict and foreign affairs. I had been reading a lot of books written by war journalists or people. I had gotten very into the Israeli Palestinian conflict in my 20s, as many people do when they're in their 20s. And I had sort of dreamed of moving abroad and but never really saw a way to do it. And then it was September 11th. We were in the midst of the invasion of Iraq, the war on terror, and I felt extremely confused about what had happened in the 20, in the 20th century in American foreign policy and around America's relationship with the world. And I think I'm from the Jersey Shore, and I had always sort of dreamed that I was going to learn everything I needed to know from living in New York City or by living in New York City. And then when I was there, I sort of recognized that many Americans really had no idea why the US had its particular relationship with the rest of the world or didn't really have a kind of context or understanding of why September 11 happened. And so while I was working at the New York observer as an editor, I applied for a fellowship that would take me to the foreign country of my choice or whichever country I applied to for two years. And the reason I chose Turkey was because and this was the secret reason, which I did not tell the fellowship committee, was because my favorite writer at the time was James Baldwin, still my favorite writer. And I had seen a documentary about him living in Istanbul, and he had said some really interesting things about what that place had meant to him. And I began wondering if he had done interviews, if he had written about Turkey, and perhaps if he could shed some light on what American power had come to mean in the 60s and the 70s when he was living there. And I got this fellowship that I applied for. I think at the time I said that I was going to write about the Armenian genocide and about activism around the issue. I did not know how to pronounce Erdogan's name properly, and it was a bit of a fluke. But I did get it and I moved. And then I fell completely in love with Turkey when I got there. And of course by then I was reading all the books I could.

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But I remember in your first book you did talk about this interest in James Baldwin. So that makes a lot of sense. But this new book, you know, the book, it has a broad focus. It's called the Age of Erdogan, but it has that broad focus. And you're combining that with this more fine grained account of life in a particular Istanbul neighborhood at Kara Gumrok. So let's, let's start talking about the book and let's start broadly. What do you see as the key features of this Age of Erdogan?

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Well, it's interesting. I think we had debated that I should call it, or that the subtitle should say Age of Authoritarianism or Age of Autocracy, like as if that would be more appealing or more universal in some way to book buyers. And I think that the feeling was that the book actually was in some ways arguing against some of the popular theories about strongmen or about authoritarianism in the 21st century. And that also I was very much trying to remain faithful to the Turkish experience or to the experience that I myself had had from 2007. To know by the end of the book, it's 2025. And because of course, I had the specificity of this neighborhood, and then I pull back and also write about the nation and about the country and in the region as a regional force. It was very much about what makes Turkey experience specific, but also in what ways does it challenge our ideas about democracy or autocracy and the age of Erdogan. I guess I more think of it as Turkey's second phase in some ways. I mean, we had the age of, we had the 20th century as Turkey as a nation state, the age of Ataturk, the many other phases that Turkey went through, but that the arrival of Erdogan was a whole new era in Turkey's history and set it completely on a different course. Course but of course, yes, these features involve migration, they involve globalization, they. They involve rapidly changing technology, they do involve regional war, and they involve this kind of new autocracy that he was setting up. But I think that what also characterizes the age of Erdogan is that there were two phases to it. There was the beginning when. The first 10 years when he was lauded by many people in the west, but also was a leader who brought a lot of good things to the country and who was himself a kind of, in a way, a democratic movement in the country. Many bad things were happening behind the scenes. But at the time, he was seen this way, and his political party, the akp, was seen that way as this kind of new invention. And I can talk about that. But then the question of why did it then become this more repressive regime that it became, or was it always meant to become that repressive regime? But I think he differs from some of the other autocrats that we're familiar with or that he is often lumped in with, like Modi, Putin, Orban, et cetera, because he did start out in one way, and then. And then at some point shifted or was forced to shift or however you

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want to think about it, that makes sense. So if that's Erdogan and some of the broad outlines of his era, then what about this place, Kara Gumrok? Can you tell us a little about the neighborhood and how you learned about it, how you became interested in it, how it became the centerpiece of the book?

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Well, so I had the money there for. It was eight years at that point. And so we're around 2015. And, of course, so many enormous things were happening. As I'm sure you remember, there was a Syrian refugee crisis. There was the Syrian civil war. There was sort of the end of the Arab Spring. This was putting a tremendous amount of pressure on Turkey in all kinds of ways. And Erdogan had a different and interesting tactic toward this migration crisis that was very different from the west and different from. Even some regional powers were also taking in refugees. There was the arrival of isis, which was a terrifying time in which I was maybe unusually terrified by. There was a new war in the southeast between the government and the pkk. There was the found or the attempt amongst the Kurds to create a new nation in northern Syria. I mean, it was just such a time of fermentation. And also Erdogan himself had slowly become, or quickly become, depending on how you look at it, more and more repressive in a very direct way, both with the Gezi park protests in 2013, and then also with the 2015 election, which many academics would say was the beginning of when Turkey fully became like a competitive authoritarian country. I mean, there are so many phases of authoritarianism, according to academics, that. But it was certainly when he was starting to shift to more hyper nationalist politics or right wing politics through an election alliance with the far right party. So I was very confused. Is basically what was happening is there was just so much to take on and to make sense out of. And I think when you're living inside of it, like in retrospect, we can sort of talk about it in even more coherent ways than we could at the time. We were just living in it. And I. I had the idea that it was, as a journalist, the time to go back to basics and just do a kind of neighborhood reporting, which is journalism 101. In many journalism schools, you go to a neighborhood and you cover that neighborhood and you write about how people are getting along. I was a huge Jane Jacobs fan and I was always very fascinated by these little mahales in Istanbul and how they function so well as these kind of living organisms, which of course I'm being a little bit misty eyed about because they were also full of violence and gossip and other things. But I was interested in them as functional units. And so I wanted to understand public life in one neighborhood, you know, maybe how it plays out on the main street. I wasn't necessarily as interested in going into people's homes, but I wanted to see how people in the coffee shops, the kavehane, in the barber shops, in the stores, how the tradesmen were navigating all of these roiling, changing issues. And also, gentrification was a big one at the time as well. And so I happened to be having dinner at a friend's house in Sulukule. They had just moved into the new condos built in Sulukule. And they said, oh my God, you have to walk down the main street of Cargamuk because all of the shops have. They said exaggeratedly, all of the shops have become Syrian and they all have Arabic script on the on. And the reason why I knew that, I did know enough. I mean, Car is not a neighborhood that many people would go to for no particular reason. You know, you might be passing through when you're in Fatih or because you're in Char, or you're going to see the Korea Museum or something like that, but you might. Or you might be walking along the old Byzantine walls. I mean, there are reasons to end up there. But not obvious ones. And I knew though that Karagamruk was Qasim Pasha's main soccer rival or football rival and Kasampasha is where Erdogan is from. And that they were both known as kind of tough guy neighborhoods. You know, they were, they were scary neighborhoods in some way, or they were forbidding neighborhoods. I knew that Kara Gamruk had this mafia history and this criminal history because of Salukale. And. And I also knew that it had been because I read about the 70s and I was very fascinated by the Gray Wolves and the mhp, the far right party that they had, that had been a kind of stronghold of, of those movements. And so I knew that the fact that these Arabs were moving in or these Syrians were moving in might have brought a lot of tension to the neighborhood. So that made me interested in how are they all getting along are like very simple reasons in the beginning. And then I went to meet the Mutar and the Mutar was this man named Ismail, who clearly was a tough guy, you know, didn't graduate from high school, was a boxer, you know, might have been a pretty right wing, a patriot, you know, all of that. And one of the first things he started telling me was about how much he missed the Greeks, which was not what I was expecting from a man like that. And then I thought, oh, here's an opportunity to tell a really complicated story or at least one that's very textured.

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And maybe if I could ask you sort of a follow up here, you mentioned some of these aspects, right? The arrival of Arabs, the arrival of Syrians, isis, the Kurdish uprisings, struggles in the southeast during these years. How did you see? Well, I mean, let's take, let's take the arrival of Syrians. What are some ways in which you saw that the tensions related that manifest themselves in Karagun Brook?

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Well, this is 2015. And so the Syrians started coming, you know, almost immediately. 2011, 2012. At this point though, in those early years, the economy was doing, still doing pretty well in Turkey. It was starting to fade, the booming Erdogan economy, but it was still doing pretty well and people were still quite enamored with him and proud of him and all of his big mega projects and everything else. So they were not. The fury against the Syrians that would come later was not as present. And one thing that was very interesting to me was that there were almost two groups in the neighborhood. There were the people who were more chp, Ataturk's party, or more secular, although everybody in this neighborhood prayed and who were more, you know, adherence to Ataturk's philosophy, who really complained about the Syrians constantly as, you know, we're going backwards. You know, we're supposed to be a Western looking nation. We're not. We have left behind our Middle Eastern past, you know, and they were complaining about the Syrians as being backwards or they don't know how to walk down the street. I mean, just these sort of epithets, this kind of prejudice. And then there were the very religious people in the neighborhood who would were more parroting Erdogan's rhetoric of we are a part of a, of a larger Ummah. You know, we're going to all look after our Muslim brothers. And for them, their Islamic identity was just more prominent. And I saw how erdogan's presence since 2000, well, since the 90s actually had started to change and the Turkish identity and so that you had people who were hanging onto the old one even stronger, more strongly. And then the people who were, you know, more identifying with this more Islamic version of Turkey. And I thought that was fascinating. But I will say that was also interesting to me as sort of an American liberal. Is that who. Where, you know, this was a time when everyone was very caught up, very angry about the migration crisis. It had. It caused right wing nationalism to spike from, you know, Europe to the United States. This is when people started talking about civilizations and all of. And there were people in Europe, obviously there was a big rejection of the Syrian refugees and certainly in the US as well, saw a lot of ugly stuff in this period. And in fact, in Turkey, what I saw is that everyone would kind of complain about them, but they were also helping them. Even the people who complained about them viciously as part of this neighborhood atmosphere, they just weren't going to not help the guy, the Syrian guy get his electricity turned on. There was a kind of basic sense of we help our neighbors that I thought was kind of was kind of interesting and maybe something that was rooted in the way that the neighborhood functioned. And I wanted to see how that played out over time. And I think that it really played out with the downfall of the Turkish economy. That's how things change and how things got worse. But you did have people in the neighborhood certainly who stayed and opened businesses and who had to navigate daily life with these Turkish people who didn't really totally want them.

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Well, so that's an aspect of Kara Grimrook. But one thing I like about this book too is that within this narrative you weave in these other parts of Turkish society and look at the changes there as well, which I found fascinating. There's a lot of different ones we could point to, but I thought we could take a few examples of these other institutions and other communities in Turkey that have been, you show, fundamentally changed during this two decades of AKP rule. One, I was thinking one that caught my eye was Ankara University's political science department, which is called, like the Mokiye. It's this very prestigious place. And you talk about it a bit, and this is the part that really I didn't know about in the details of. And the details you go into I found fascinating. So perhaps if you could talk a little bit about that or any other example that you feel is more pertinent would be wonderful as well.

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No, I'm glad you asked. I mean, obviously, when I set out to do the book, I was just going, maybe not obviously. I hope it's not obvious. I was just going to write about this neighborhood and I was going to write about these four characters in this neighborhood. And there are two major storylines there. One is an attack on the Syrian sweet shop, and one is about this election in 2019 when people challenged the Mutar for his seat. And, you know, those were the two main story of that. And I wanted to show both through this neighborhood, how Turkish identity was changing, but also how people respond to increasing authoritarianism and how they change over time. And also just to give a portrait of how Turks speak, how they, you know, just to bring it to life in some way that I think is not always super accessible to everybody. But I realize that in the 21st century, you can. Or when you're telling the story also of Erdogan, who is obviously a main character in the book, you can't limit it to just a neighborhood because the layers of trans, you know, of transformation are multiple during this period. We live in a globalized world. We also know what's happening in 72 different places at once now, thanks to social media and the Internet. And so. And I also wanted to show how these larger forces play out on individual lives in a small place like the neighborhood and how you can sort of see them all interact. So my idea was that there would have to be one about how the state was changing and one about how geopolitics were changing and about the economy, which comes later in the book. And the Ankara University, I mean, the political science department in Ankara at Ankara University Mukier. I had written a magazine story about this, actually, and that's how I got into it. But it Struck me as another way that. And it was so shaping my ideas at the time. So I felt it was important to put in the book was here was a state institution founded even before the Turkish Republic. It was actually founded during the Ottoman Empire, but it was part of the modernization of the Turkish state. And it was an institution that people like Erewhon and the Gulens to some degree saw as something they had to break down or take over, because it was seen as such a Kemalist institution. And I thought it was also so representative of this other problem when we talk about institutions, which is that, yes, it was founded on these certain principles of creating, like a Westernized Turkish person who adhered to certain values and behaved in a certain way and also ran the Turkish state in a certain way, because Mulchier very much provided the personnel for diplomacy and for bureaucracy in the country. But Mulchier was also a place that had been set up to have a lot of internal freedom, so that actually, you know, the people who taught there and the students who went there very much changed with the politics of the country. So you had leftists and you had right wingers, and you had Islamists, and you had this sort of vibrant intellectual atmosphere that would challenge the state as much as it would provide the personnel for the state. And that in and of itself, you could just tell the story of Turkey through Muthtier. But then Erdogan comes along, or the Erdogan regime, and they seek to really destroy the freedom of it, both the Kemalist nature of it, but also the freedom that this very liberal institution had been allowed to have or that had hung onto and that I saw as an example of. It was where he was throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It was where he was throwing out this history of this country that was very, very Turkish and very, very particular to Turkey. And he didn't necessarily have anything to replace it with. And that was during a period that was happening after the military coup 17, 18, where nobody really understood what exactly Erdogan was doing with this state he was taking over. And I also wanted to have that example in the book, because my neighborhood is mainly up of people who vote for erdogan and maybe 25% CHP, or people who don't vote for Erdogan, but are really not. They're kind of old school Turkish, but not the elites, not the white Turks. I mean, these are kind of working class people themselves. So. But none of the people in my neighborhood were necessarily the ones being directly oppressed or targeted by Erdogan. And I felt to tell the whole story, I had to show the academics, I had to show the journalists, I had to show the intellectuals, because that was obviously the people who produce information were being targeted. And I also thought it would be interesting to see, like, even if the people in Cargill don't really care about an institution like Mulchier, there is a way, of course, that attacking the information producers in the country will eventually affect every neighborhood in the country, because the credibility of information is being degraded, and the freedom of people to express things and challenge things is being degraded. And my people, in my neighborhood, my people didn't always see this at first, but they saw it later. They did see it later. And I wanted to show how that played out. So that section was important to me. My editors did try to cut it, but I fought to keep it. And then there was also the one about the ship spotter, which was also random but important to me. And that I thought showed something very interesting about geopolitics. And then the earthquake into 2023, which I thought was the culmination of all of Erdogan's. Not only his economic policies, but his challenge to the law and also construction was where he built his power. So when the earthquake happened and all the buildings collapsed, it was more than a metaphor, but he came back, as always. I mean, the thing that kept happening is, because I worked on this book for 10 to, you know, seven to 10 years, is that he kept surviving. Every time people thought that Erdogan was done for, why did he keep surviving? And that was a question I was also trying to answer.

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This kind of brings me to another question I was thinking of asking, which is that, as you say, you were writing the book for a long time, during the last six or seven years. Right. You haven't been living full time in Istanbul anymore, in Turkey anymore, but you're going back, so. Yeah. And you're keeping in touch. So during this time period, what sort of themes and trends that you were witnessing then have persisted? I mean, yes, Erdogan is still there in some form and at the head of some political coalition. How do you. What trends do you see that representing, or what other trends do you see that have persisted for this last 10 years?

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Well, I think it. I don't really know the answer to that in some ways. So, for example, if we take the effect that the Syrian refugee crisis had on Turkish identity, I think that Erdogan did this very clever thing where he was one of the only autocrats to not see migration or as a threat to him, or to use that, exploit a crisis like that in a racist way or a prejudiced way for votes. Right. In the beginning, in the beginning, instead, he said he wanted to make himself out to be this big leader on the world stage. I'm going to take in all these refugees. We can take care of it ourselves. We don't want the international community coming in. I think this was really a very crucial turning point for Erdogan and Turkey's sense of their own autonomy again on the world stage. And we're going to protect them, and we can take care of them. And he didn't really take care of them, and nobody took care of them. Right. I mean, they were left to fend for themselves, which was, again, why I was interested in examining how that played out in Istanbul, in an average Turkish neighborhood. But then, over time, he's becoming more repressive. He's putting Salah Demirtas in jail and Osman Kavala in jail. He's cracking down on all these activists. He's destroying the hdp. And these would normally be things that the European Union would criticize him for. But what he suddenly recognized he had, because he could see that right when nationalism was spiking in Europe, was, why I have all these refugees that you don't want to come to Europe, And I can either let them in or I can stop them from coming. And then all of a sudden, in a very grotesque way, I think uses the refugees as a bargaining chip, and the EU complies with this. I mean, they start giving him money to support those refugees on Turkish soil and essentially to keep them there. And so this creates a tremendous amount of tension as well in my neighborhood that people are very angry, like, where is this money going? And of course the money's going to Erdogan. So, I mean, whether or not it wasn't, they all thought, and there were all these rumors, as there often is, all the scapegoating, like the money is going to the refugees. You know, Erdogan built more hospitals, and he did these, supposedly did these things with this investment, but really it was shoring up his regime. And, you know, the criticism of Erdogan to this day is minimal in a kind of shocking way. And I can take that forward. I mean, there are a few things said here and there, but they. Erdogan managed through this long process From, I think, 2015 and onward to make himself indispensable in various ways. And I think the refugees were a way that they. He did that. But as the economy really tanked, as we know 2018, 19. And by this point, I'm 2019 was when I left, it became so awful for Syrians in Turkey, especially in the southern parts of Turkey. I think in Istanbul, they could live slightly more anonymous lives or they could, you know, run businesses or. And a lot of those Syrians who had gone there in the beginning had been a bit wealthier. You know, they had actually come with some means, people who came later came out of serious desperation. And they were all along the border and they were suffering heinous, heinous, heinous forms of, of racism. And then there were pogroms, and there were. There were all kinds of acts of violence happening throughout this entire period that to some degree we didn't even know about. And as Erdogan saw that shift and even his own people rejecting the presence of the refugees or taking it out, his rhetoric also started to change. And he actually worked with the European Union to throw Syrians over the border back into Syria. And as he was. This is where these things all really do come together. So he's, of course, kind of bargaining with Putin about what can be done in Syria. And his, his main goal at this point is to get quash the pkt, the ypg, clear out northern Syria. And so this becomes a twofer, you know, a sort of three fur in a way, where he's clearing out the ypg, violently attacking them, all kinds of abuse is happening. Then he thinks he can return his Syrian refugee population to that northern part of Syria while he's engaging his businessman cronies to build apartment buildings and schools and everything else. And so for a long time, Gaziantep is like, directly connected to many of these cities in Syria. So in any case, he just manages to pull off a lot of these shocking maneuvers. But of course, that only adds to people's conspiratorial thinking. It's like, how. Why. Why is this happening? Why are these. These. There are these large movements of peoples happening, like just through, you know, Erdogan's force of will. And so I think that now at this point, Syrians are leaving because they don't want to be there anymore. But Erdogan has managed to have a tremendous amount of, or a decent amount of control, a lot of control over the new Syrian regime under Ahmad Al Shar. So he managed to pull that one out. And he also just keeps managing to survive. Now, of course, he's managing to survive because in 20 again, 18, 19, he creates this whole new political system at which he's the center. He has oppressed or destroyed all other political parties besides the chp. And that point, he just has all of the institutions. But I think what's interesting is that people were ready to write off Turkey as just a democratic failure. And we had 2019 where there was, you know, a real rejection of the Auk Party in the mayoral elections and again in 2024 in those municipal elections. And so you see this other thing persist in this history until very recently, which is this incredible force in Turkey around the vote. People love to vote. People loved their relatively free elections, which became less free over time, but people exercised their right to vote. And, you know, that still managed to have certain impacts on the political scene until just very recently when Erdogan was threatened enough to basically out and out destroy Ekremi, Imomolu and the chp. But it's interesting how much time it took for that to happen. And I don't even know what we call this, this gradualist dictatorship that we have now.

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Creeping, then galloping authoritarianism.

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Creeping, then galloping. I mean, but also, you know, I think that some. There's some speculation now that we're in a moment where even the men around him don't know what the hell he's doing, that there's a bit of a black box scenario going on. But in terms of other trends, I mean, I was just there in March, and the construction continues, I will say that. But also, people are really, really suffering from this economic crisis. And I don't know how it will. And what comes with that is a. This goes back to the whole point about how he's changed the Turkish identity. That identity that he created amongst his supporters is collapsing because he has broken their hearts. Everything that they believed in was not only about Islamism or about a new Muslim identity, or all of pride. And, you know, it was about prosperity. And they believed that their children had a new kind of future in Turkey, both where they have more freedoms as religious people and where they have all of this economic promise and development. And now that has stopped. And that's what I saw in my neighborhood, really, was just devastation over that.

B

Well, I mean, it's a sprawling topic, right? And there's. There's so much we could. We could talk about. And the book. And the book does. And you put so much in there. And so the other thing I wanted to talk about in this interview was putting the. Almost the content aside for a second, how you went about trying to capture this. You talked about this a little bit in terms of how you wanted different stories, different anecdotes to represent different things. But this really does interest me, because you're a writer. You like to write. You teach writing at Princeton, at New York University, at Bard. So what were you trying to do? What are you trying to do stylistically with this book? And to do it like, what sort of challenges were you finding yourself, I hope, enjoyably trying to solve?

A

No, it was actually a nightmare. But there was. There was. There was a lot of it that I enjoyed. But I will. Let's put. I can pull back for a second to just say my first book to some degree, was also a criticism of journalism and the way that Western foreign correspondents operate and possibly the limits, like the ultimate limits of the American mind in understanding foreign countries. And I still very much believe. And so by the end of that book, I actually had talked myself out of being a foreign correspondent, because I had come to the conclusion that actually there are these limitations in terms of your prejudices and your biases and just sort of the way that your mind is formed, and especially for Americans, for particular reasons. But I went back, obviously, to working as a journalist because I had to make a living. And then I did think to myself, well, you did the criticism. Why don't you try to write a Turkey book now? And I sometimes really regret it when people that decision, because I think I had set the bar very high without even realizing it. And so it was sort of like, okay, what is the best way that you would offer a portrait of a whole country, of a whole society? Because I think there was a part of me that didn't feel like I could just do a part of it. I wanted to tell this bigger story. The book that really influenced me a lot was the Future Is History by Masha Gessen, which is about Russia, because she offered also a psychological portrait of post Soviet history. And she did it through ideas and through certain intellectuals. And so I wondered if there was a way to do that. I think what I ended up doing in Turkey's case was to entwine Ismail, the main character in my neighborhood, and Erdogan as two figures who were foils of each other, who were both of the same generation, who kind of grew up in similar neighborhoods, were exposed to similar forces, but who ended up being different political leaders. Of course, one being the most powerful in the country and the one being the least powerful in the country, but the mutar is still an elected official. And so that was one thing that I was trying to do, to sort of show how these ideas and how this temperament played out. I think another thing I was trying to show was this desire amongst Turks that I think was shared across all political parties and movements, which was for autonomy, for sovereignty, for how to negotiate this relationship they had with the United States and being in the American sphere and with Europe, but also these other countries. But how Erdogan very much was embodying the desire of his own supposed people, of religious people, to have more freedom and more autonomy and power, but also of Turkey itself, and that that was often what some of his people saw in him. So I was kind of trying to draw out some of those themes. I think that I was also very much trying to just bring Turkish life to life. You know, like, I just wanted to show how people talked and how they interacted with each other. I did not choose my four characters in Kargamruk really, with any specificity, like, oh, I want this person to represent this and this person to represent that. It was more that they were interesting, they were complex. I was just trying to genuinely show how they changed over time, or if they did. I think I also wanted to capture this condition that we're all living in, of being aware of world forces, larger forces, and how they impact our individual lives, but not always being able to make sense out of them. And I wanted to, you know, this neighborhood had Syrian refugees, the effects of the Syrian civil war. Erdogan also, I think his regime and his radicalization was very much affected by the Syrian civil War. I wanted to show how this regional environment could have such a big impact on domestic politics in various countries. And I ultimately, I think, wanted to show where we were ending up with Erdogan, how he was, that he had created a new kind of position for a leader for Turkey, and maybe in general, which was someone who was basically failing domestically at that point, but succeeding internationally. And what did this say about the role that, like, major global leaders have? Because he had suddenly positioned himself in between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel and Palestine or Europe and the Middle east in this way that put Turkey as, you know, the bridge between east and west in a whole new light, like, actually, and as a whole new kind of mediator on the global stage. I think that I was very interested in challenging traditional ideas of the strongman, because I don't think Erdogan's politics were entirely populist and grievance based in the beginning. I think they were rooted in genuine, both genuine needs of a certain population that had been disenfranchised, but also because he seized on this major force in Turkish 20th century history, which was migration, which was like, these people come from the countryside to the city. They are formed by this experience. And I'm going to harness this energy and these desires and to create a new political party that way. I think he also was a blip. Like, if you look at Turkish history, it's really an authoritarian country throughout. Right. With these democratic movements. And he, he was a blip in time of, you know, both. It was the beginnings of the war on terror and also overlapping with this promise of Obama that failed. Right. And sort of liberal politics. So all of those things, Ruben, I was trying to do, but I think that overall, as I said, the future is history. My book is not as good as that book. But at the end I felt like I, as someone who had never been to Russia, had a sense of what Russia was. And I just wanted someone who was going to read about Turkey to have a much deeper and nuanced understanding and feeling for the place after reading my book. And I was just trying to do the most faithful job to the country that I had lived in and love as a journalist. And. Yeah, so that, that was ultimately the goal, to be accurate.

B

No, you know, what you, you know, what you said, I mean, I was planning. I still am wanting to ask you in this last question about what you're working on now, but what you were just saying that after your first book, you were kind. You were thinking about being over being a foreign correspondent. I think maybe that's the place to bring this together. Because the most recent thing I read of yours after reading this book was your profile or a book review, we can say, of some Pete Hegseth writings. And so you are focusing more on, I guess we can say, domestic affairs now. So what are you working on now? And maybe also how has your thinking about Turkey come to inform the way you're thinking about writing about domestic affairs? More.

A

Yeah, I think that, you know, I've learned so much about the US by studying Turkey and vice versa, and it does make me think of things differently. I never wanted to compare, like, Trump's America and Erdogan's Turkey in my book. But by the end it was unavoidable because when Trump's in Trump's second term in 2025, he was just doing so many things like cracking down on universities, et cetera. That really reminded me of Erdogan, except it was happening so much faster than Erdogan had managed to pull it off in Turkey, which I thought was terrifying. But I think that Yeah, I think that I don't live in Turkey anymore. And you. You really lose something when you're not there. I mean, I. I struggled with the end of my book because I wasn't living there and I could. I could only really write about it after I went back. I mean, part of the reason the earthquake of 2023 is in there is because I went to write a story about it and I was there for like two months and, and I felt. And during that period I interviewed all of these amazing academics who had done all this new work on Turkey. And I felt it reinvigorated the book and I kept following it and kept going back and. And I feel like I kind of said what I have about Turkey. I will always want to write about it in certain ways, but that now I'm in the US and I want to go back to writing about American foreign policy and America's relationship with the world. That was why I wrote an article about Gaza last summer, which was really much more from my interest in American foreign policy. And then, yes, Pete Hegseth is related to that as well. And I think I now, because this book, the Turkey book, was very much a book of reportage that I'm not really in very much myself. There's not very much first person. And I was very much trying to stay faithful to the characters in the book and even the way that they talk and all of that was very much also kind of experimenting with language that now I would like to just do a different style book that is shorter, that is not as sprawling, that does not take seven to 10 years, and is more of an extended polemic or essay. I also think people want short books now. Some of my favorite books from the mid century or the early 20th century, Virginia Woolf's Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid. You know, some of these short little books are ones I'd like to try my hand at. So I want to just try something different. I do see my first and second book as a continuum. Like, first, it's my. I don't understand, you know, the World Book or Turkey. Second book is the Turkey book. And to some degree, probably what I write next will be about returning to the us which was very, very difficult for me, actually. I don't know how you felt, but I found it harrowing.

B

I mean, the US isn't a utopia, let's just put it that way.

A

So, yeah, I think that's where I am, but it's. I rewrote this book from life itself probably five times just to if you were curious about the writing, it was a very difficult process. And so, yeah, I want, I want a little break from, from that.

B

Well, I mean, I guess the bottom line for me is it's a beautifully written book. If people are hearing us talk and haven't thought about reading yet, I hope they'll go and find it and read it. And if they have started to think about reading, they've seen it on the shelves, well, they hope they take the plunge and go get it and read it because it's quite good. So, yeah. Well, thank you for taking the time to talk to me.

A

Thank you, Ruben. Thank you. I really appreciate it. It's great to. Great to talk to you. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website, newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ew booksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.