Standup vs. Erdoğan; American imams; Kurdish peace; LLMs vs Universities; Turkey-EU defense industry cooperation; Turkey-Syria relations

This is a weekly post wherein I write about things I’ve been reading, watching, and thinking about. The first part is free, the rest is for paid subscribers only.

Also, my apologies for not sending this out in the last two weeks. I had to deal with pressing family issues, and simply couldn’t read much.

First off, I was delighted to see that Adam Tooze linked to Kültürkampf not once, but twice in his Chartbook newsletter the other week! We here at KK HQ are big fans of his work, and were honored to be linked.

Second, with the World Cup, two Kültürkampf posts have been linked to a lot. The first is my writeup of the Erdoğan palace’s politicization of sports, and what that’s doing to the country’s performance in athletic events:

The second pertains to Turkey’s ridiculous name change policy. That piece is here:

Turkey made the change in 2022, but the international community is only beginning to metabolize it with events like the World Cup. Funny thing is that Fahrettin Altun, the guy who most likely came up with it, was fired after he crossed swords with another power player in the palace. I think we could get to a point where the palace hangs it up around Altun’s neck and quietly walks back the policy.

And third (and most importantly), I was delighted to join Amberin Zaman on her podcast to talk about Turkey’s performance in the World Cup, the politics of it, as well as other issues, like succession.

That’s here on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify below:

I have to lead with this hour-and-a-half show that standup comedian Deniz Göktaş dropped on YouTube Thursday. It already has almost 3 million views, and is spreading like wildfire across social media. I’m guessing that a huge chunk of Turkey’s 86 million people have seen at least parts of it on their feeds. It’s a media event that country hasn’t experienced before.