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Solved: Leonard Cohen’s Secret Chord from “Hallelujah”
Diplomatic Masterclass: Dayton Peace Accords Negotiations and Implementation
Reaching an agreement to end the war in the Balkans was a long and challenging endeavor. It involved various bureaus within the U.S. Department of State, interagency cooperation across the U.S. government, support from allies and the international community, and intensive American shuttle diplomacy and negotiations led by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and his team. When the agreement was reached on November 21, 1995, the peace process didn’t end; instead, it entered an even more complex phase: implementation.
For the past thirty years, American and foreign diplomats, together with international organizations such as NATO, Office of High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, United Nations, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and European Union, among others, have worked tirelessly to implement the provisions of the agreement, build democratic institutions, strengthen the rule of law, and support long term peace and stability in the region. Today, thanks to these efforts, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region have achieved considerable progress, even as many challenges remain.
The negotiations and implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords offer an important case study filled with lessons learned and remarkable diplomatic and personal stories that enrich the training of the next generations of diplomats specializing in conflicts, peace negotiations, and post-conflict reconstruction, as well as historians, students of international affairs, and the public interested in American diplomacy, European affairs, or the Balkans.
Each oral history below captures diverse experiences and voices of diplomats, national security leaders, members of the U.S. Congress and their staff, military officers, academics, and members of the public. Some were in the room where it happened, others played key roles in the implementation process. Some were just observers and witnesses to this landmark moment in U.S. diplomatic history, while others were inspired by the agreement to actively engage with the region. Welcome to the room where it happened!
The road to the Dayton Peace Accords was complex and challenging. In the following diplomatic masterclass, Ambassadors Peter Galbraith and Christopher Hill provide a very engaging discussion and reflection on agreements and events that preceded the Dayton negotiations, the dynamics and controversies during the talks, and lessons learned from the process. It is an introduction like no other to this moment in America’s diplomatic history.
Teams’ invasive Wi‑Fi tracking sparks backlash as users say Microsoft crossed a line — “There must be a team at Microsoft tasked with making Teams worse”
I definitely prefer working at home. Despite the arguments that interaction between workers sparks creativity, I find that my staff is so used to working online, that they’re just as creative working on their own computers.
I’ve noticed that when I tell Sam’s or Walmart I’m on my way to pickup my order, they immediately start tracking me. Why do they need to know where I’m coming from?
From Windows Central <windowscentral@smartbrief.com>
By Kevin Okemwa published 2 days ago
A vast majority of users feel like Microsoft Teams’ Wi‑Fi location tracking feature crosses the line between productivity and surveillance.
Last year, I reported on a new Microsoft Teams feature, which raised controversy and privacy concerns among most users. The feature in question automatically updates a user’s work location when their device is connected to an office Wi-Fi network — becoming your boss’s lapdog, by snitching on your live location.
Shortly after the post became viral, Microsoft quietly changed how the feature works, as highlighted below:
“When users connect to their organization’s Wi-Fi, Teams will soon be able to automatically update their work location to reflect the building they’re working from. This feature will be off by default. Tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in.”
“Microsoft is blurring the lines between coworker collaboration and IT oversight.
IT wise, yes the info was always there. But nobody is asking IT to snitch on you. The entire point of this is that your boss just has to click your name on Teams and now they know where you are. No IT requests, no privacy/ethics concerns, no breach of trust. It’s just right there at any time.
What’s the next step? The same tracking but for your phone? Microsoft letting your boss look at your screen? Sending your boss daily reports on click rates, words typed, program usage, etc?”
Interestingly, some users seem unfazed by the change, claiming that most Microsoft products and services already ship with this feature in some shape or form. “Most Microsoft products already meet the criteria for what we’d normally call spyware. What’s another drop in a flooded bucket?” a Reddit user indicated.
Some users came up with some interesting ideas on how to bypass the new Teams feature’s invasive nature, suggesting using a wired connection at the office instead of Wi-Fi. “I just won’t install teams on my phone then, and when I’m working remote they can’t find me anyway they can just message me and I’ll answer from the laptop,” another Reddit user indicated.
On the other hand, some users suggested that Microsoft’s efforts were seemingly misplaced and indicated that it should redirect them to fix some UI and UX elements in its Windows operating system. “God forbid they spend time to make the Windows search actually search my computer again,” a user indicated.
After reviewing hundreds of comments, it’s clear that users either want the feature scrapped entirely or simply don’t care, since many work remotely. “I swear there must be a team at MS that is just tasked with making Teams worse,” a user indicated on Reddit.
The History of the New Year’s Eve Ball Drop
Introduction to Oral History for Research
Submitted by Amy Starecheski on 12/19/2025 – 10:43am
Seminar January 28, 2026
Location NY United States
In this interactive half-day workshop taught by the Director of Columbia Oral History, Amy Starecheski, participants will be introduced to oral history as a dynamic tool for engaged, collaborative research.
Oral history—a conversation about the past, happening in the present, and oriented towards the future—is a core part of human life. Oral history can also be a more formalized research practice. In this interactive workshop, participants will be introduced to oral history as a dynamic tool for engaged, collaborative research, in applications from qualitative social sciences to the creation of primary sources for historical archives. Topics will include:
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Critical history of oral history as a research practice
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Interviewing and listening
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Consent, copyright, and legal releases
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Tools for audio recording
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Project design and planning
This workshop is in-person only and will not be recorded. Capacity is limited. It is free and open to the public, with a number of spots set aside for Columbia affiliates. Registration is required and the deadline to register is January 28, 2026. Participants should plan to attend for the entire training.
Register
URL
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/introduction-to-oral-history-for-research-tickets-…
The Evil Genius of Fascist Design: How Mussolini and Hitler Used Art & Architecture to Project Power
An look at Architecture as propaganda.
in Architecture, History, Politics | December 17th, 2025
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they declared the beginning of a “Thousand-Year Reich” that ultimately came up about 988 years short. Fascism in Italy managed to hold on to power for a couple of decades, which was presumably still much less time than Benito Mussolini imagined he’d get on the throne. History shows us that regimes of this kind suffered a fairly severe stability problem, which is perhaps why they needed to put forth such a solid, formidable image. The IMPERIAL video above explores “the evil genius of fascist design,” focusing on how Hitler and Mussolini rendered their ideologies in art and the built environment, but many of its observations can be generalized to any political movement that seeks total control of a society, especially if that society has a sufficiently glorious-seeming past.
Fascism’s visual language has many inspirations, two of the most important cited in the video being Romanticism and Futurism. The former offered “a longing for the past, an obsession with nature, and a focus on the sublime”; the latter “worshiped speed, machines, and violence.” Despite their apparent contradiction, these dual currents allowed fascism “a peculiar ability to look both backward and forward, to summon the glory of past empires while promising a radical new future.”
In Italy, such an empire may have been distant in time, but it was nevertheless close at hand. “We dream of a Roman Italy that is wise and strong, disciplined and Imperial.” Even Hitler drew from the glories of ancient Rome and Greece to shape his own aspirational vision of an all-powerful German civilization.
Hence both of those dictators undertaking large-scale Neoclassical-style architectural projects “to bring the aesthetics of ancient Rome to their city streets,” including even muscular statues meant to embody the officially sanctioned human ideal. Of course, the builders of the United States of America had also looked to Roman forms, but they did so at a smaller, more humane scale. Fascist structures were designed not just to be eternal symbols but overwhelming presences, intended “not to elevate the soul, but to crush the individual into the crowd and promote conformity.” This, in theory, would make the citizen feel small and powerless, but with an accompanying quasi-religious longing to be part of a larger project: that of fascism, which subordinates everything to the state. For the likes of Mussolini and Hitler (an artist-turned-politician, as one can hardly fail to note), aesthetics was power — albeit not quite enough, in the event, to ensure their own survival.