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no bull, and the aftermath.

Hello and welcome to the LawFair podcast, I'm Benjamin Whittes. Today on the podcast, Laura

Dean, already well known to LawFair readers as the author of our chiro diary. Laura, for

those who haven't been following the diary, is a chiro-based freelance writer who has worked

for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a journalist and as an election monitor in

a number of countries in the region. She's in the United States for a spell and I reached

her by phone in Maine to discuss goings on in Egypt, the military there, the Muslim Brotherhood,

and life amid the revolution.

So Laura, how does somebody end up being a freelance writer in chiro in the middle of a revolution?

Well, it's been a bit of a roundabout route. I grew up in Bahrain, which is a small island

nexus out of Arabia, and so have sort of built in interests, both personal and professional

for the Middle East. Unfortunately, I didn't learn Arabic really growing up and so I studied

it in college, which sort of brought me back again and again to different parts of the region.

After college, I did a stint in journalism in DC and then ended up working at the Senate Foreign

Relations Committee, focusing mostly on Middle East issues. And then I was always already looking

for a way to get back to the region and then when the sort of uprisings that then came to

be known as the Arab Spring started happening, I became almost desperate to get back and then

I found a job working as an election observer starting out in Tunisia and then migrating over

to Egypt and I eventually ended up in Libya doing that work. I had always wanted to get back

...