My name is Kyle W. Orton. I work as a freelance researcher, writer, and editor.
The plan for the newsletter is to write about whatever is interesting me at the time and deserves more exploration than a thread on Twitter (where, incidentally, I can be found.) There is not really a schedule, as such, for publication, but there will be some broad themes.
My contemporary work is on security issues and foreign policy, particularly in or from the Middle East. Over the last few years, I have focused mostly on the war in Syria, and almost by definition this has meant covering regional geopolitics and terrorism, whether Islamist groups like the Islamic State (ISIS) and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), or the secular terrorists like the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
My interests in history run pretty broad: early Christianity, Islam and its interaction with the West, intelligence and espionage, the Reformation, the English Civil War, Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, the First World War, Communism and the Cold War, pre-Revolutionary Iran. So the page will likely feature various pieces on these and other subjects, including book reviews.
Occasional film reviews will also likely be a feature of the newsletter.
Past work can be found at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, UnHerd, Newsweek, European Eye on Radicalization, NOW Lebanon, The International Business Times, The Independent, The New Arab, and my old blog archive is here.
