I’ll be intermittently available and unavailable all day. (How to contact me)

I’ve tried to keep this day clear on my calendar to write a 4,000-word article on civil-military relations in Latin America, and I’ve been mostly successful in keeping it clear. I do, however, have about 500 e-mails to process that I couldn’t get to last week, when I was writing that New York Times piece, producing that podcast, and writing the weekly border and Colombia updates.

I want to spend the morning and early afternoon updating news and email (I got too busy to post news links here over the past several days), while watching the event about Colombia that WOLA is co-hosting. (I have no specific duties for that, but want to watch and recommend it.) I have a 2PM meeting with legislative staff, and starting after that I’m going to turn off devices and communications apps so that I can have several solid hours of writing time.

In addition to an article on the state of civil-military relations, I’m also giving two talks about the subject next week at the Latin American Studies Association congress. As I put those together, I’ve been playing around with a screencasting app on my Mac, and pretty pleased with the results. So as I practice, I look forward to having a screencast to share here.