The War That Did Not End
An introduction to a three-part series on Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand
Nazem Alkudsi
At the intersection of civilizations — where belief, power, and capital shape what nations build and what they forget. 18 years at ADIA. Former SWF CEO. CFA.
The Mirror Above the Counter
On the question we replaced, and what it cost.
What the Water Shows
The pot is small. What it holds is not.
The Monk Who Would Not Take Sides
Thich Nhat Hanh, 1926–2022, and what his refusal asks of us now.
The Libraries That Burned Twice
On Nalanda, Baghdad, and the Semiconductor Chokepoint Where the World’s Knowledge Now Lives. Nazem Long Arc News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Bihar, 1193 The ruins of Nalanda Mahavihara, Bihar. The conqueror stood in the
What Lin Zexu Started
On the Intended and Unintended Consequences of the Opium Wars — and What They Ask of Anyone Watching a Chokepoint Close • • • Twenty million people would die because of what happened in those trenches. But in June 1839, standing on the shore at Humen, the man who ordered the trenches dug could
Essays
The Grain That Never Came
Bengal, 1943, and the Architecture of Starvation
The Coup That Never Ended
How the 1953 removal of Mosaddegh set a structural precedent for everything that followed — from the Islamic Revolution to the ghost fleets drifting dark in the Gulf today.
The Underwriter's War
How an Actuarial Calculation Closed the Strait of Hormuz
The Friday Deadline
Read slowly. The building has no windows on the side that faces the river. I don’t know why I noticed that first — maybe because the man walking into it had spent three years building something whose entire promise was transparency. Dario Amodei walked into the Pentagon one day in
When India Said No to Bill Gates
The Moment Morality Reclaimed the Stage at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 Reports say the chair sat empty. That was the thing people noticed first — before the speeches, before the pledges, before the Delhi Declaration. An empty seat in the front row of the Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi,
Essays
Rock, Water, and Wire
The AI race is not a software competition. It is a geology competition. The future is not being built in the cloud. It is being pulled from the earth, carried by the wire, and cooled by the water.