Michael Varga

My mother loved to cook. She was most at home in her kitchen. As an Italian, she had grown up savoring the tasty...

In the 1980s, I was an American diplomat assigned to the U.S. Consulate in Casablanca, Morocco. At that time, King Hassan II was...

In the waiting room at my oncologist’s office I spied a picture book tucked under the years-old People magazines: Hemingway’s Paris. Paris had...

I love our country. I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa in the 1970s. I served as a Foreign Service Officer...

The lines of Iranians formed early every day. Often they came straight from the airport. They would line up outside the American consulate...

Each of us follows a unique destiny, even as we know we will each wind up dead one day. Some people afflicted with...

Often the word “outlier” is used in cancer treatment to describe a patient who beats the odds and lives longer than expected. Those...

In the middle of an exam, my Chadian students suddenly stood up and fled my classroom. A minute before, they had seen through...

Two Americans were asking for a meeting with me. They had traveled from Alabama to Washington to lobby for more assistance to Lebanon,...

In 1995 at the G-7 Summit in Halifax (Canada), Secretary of State Warren Christopher was meeting with the Japanese finance minister. Somehow the...