With travelers entering Indonesia still requiring quarantine, Bali’s Ubud Writers and Readers Festival launched in hybrid form Thursday. With Covid easing in Bali, some events, running through October 17, are taking place live on the island, with some in Perth due to the difficulties traveling to and from key festival market Australia, some prerecorded and all available online and on demand, making content available globally. Festival founder and director Janet DeNeefe says the hybrid format presents new challenges after last year’s completely online event, but it doesn’t change the mission.

“We have a purpose,” DeNeefe says. “The writers and readers festival began after the first Bali bombings [of 2002]. It was an attempt to re-flower the community, to uplift the people, to boost the economy, to bring a bit of inspiration, create a platform for dialogue.

“That was how we began. And now more than ever we have to continue because this is what people need right now, some sort of event you can see. With the semi lock-down, there’s not a lot of action on the streets here. So, our job is to create the best face to face event as we can, given the situation. So we’ve become a hybrid festival.”

While it may be easier to get top writers to commit to a remote interview rather than spend hours traveling to appear in person, recruiting has become more difficult in some ways, DeNeefe says. “A good deal of the festival’s attraction is the sheer fact that it’s in Ubud, so you’re in this beautiful location with really warm, friendly, hospitable people, great food, great weather. We have so many wonderful aspects of Ubud that attract people, so suddenly when you’re online, you lose the very magic of the festival in a way.”

A restaurant owner, chef and cookbook author before she began the literary festival – later adding a food festival – DeNeefe hopes to restore some magic by tapping into Bali’s innate creativity with an artisans market running during the festival’s two weekends. Many vendors are hospitality industry workers who’ve found new pursuits with Bali tourism largely halted for the past 18 months.

“It’s all a learning experience. Some of the aspects that we have learned about the online festival, we will take into this festival. We’re slowly morphing into a modern era,” DeNeefe says. “Of course it has its challenges, but it’s made us think outside the box and be a little bit braver perhaps as we’re venturing into a whole new territory.”

Former US diplomat and broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a columnist for ICE 365, a contributor to Forbes and Inside Asian Gaming, columnist/correspondent for Asia Times, and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

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Wakayama Palace stands tall in the prefecture bidding for a Japan casino license. (Photo courtesy Wakayama Prefecture Govt)

Former Las Vegas Sands president and COO William Weidner may be the most accomplished gaming executive still in the business. Weidner’s 14 years with LVS included building its Vegas Strip Venetian complex, gaining entry to Macau, developing Cotai as world’s most lucrative casino cluster, winning a license in Singapore and conceiving what’s become the world’s most admired integrated resort there. So Weidner provided instant credibility when he joined Canadian private equity investor Clairvest’s effort to win an integrated resort license in Wakayama Prefecture near Osaka.

Perhaps, then, it shouldn’t be surprising that Weidner came under attack via anonymous documents recounting legal settlements of US government charges against Las Vegas Sands during his tenure. The documents may aim to weaken Wakayama’s IR bid, but it’s equally likely they stem from a long running dispute involving Weidner’s Global Gaming Asset Management firm and Philippine billionaire Enrique Razon’s Bloomberry Resorts, or a Taiwan’s American Asian Entertainment’s US$12 billion lawsuit against LVS over termination of their Macau partnership, in which Weidner was a leading actor but is not a party to the litigation.

In any case, the attack is another ugly aspect of Japan’s casino legalization saga that has limited public support and gotten the cold shoulder from leading international casino companies and Japan’s largest cities and tourist destinations.

Former US diplomat and broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a columnist for ICE 365, a contributor to Forbes and Inside Asian Gaming, columnist/correspondent for Asia Times, and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

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From its Connecticut base, Mohegan Gaming has expanded to Las Vegas and Korea. (Photo credit: Mohegan Gaming & Entertainment)

In its first quarter century, Native American casino operator Mohegan Gaming and Entertainment has expanded from its Connecticut base to Las Vegas and Asia. In an exclusive interview, MGE president and CEO Ray Pineault, the second Tribe member to lead its gaming arm, talks about those milestones and the Mohegan vision that looks 13 generations ahead.

Former US diplomat and broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a columnist for ICE 365, a contributor to Forbes,columnist/correspondent for Asia Times, and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

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A multibillion dollar casino complex in New York City would give the region a much needed economic jolt in the wake of Covid. But if New York State issues the three casino licenses permitted by law for the downstate metro area, New York City won’t get a showplace integrated resort worthy of the leading US market. A single license is New York’s best bet for tourism, business and jobs.

Former US diplomat and broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a columnist for ICE 365, a contributor to Forbes, columnist/correspondent for Asia Times, and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

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In this year brimming with loss, the two most consequential teachers of my college years passed away. Historian Donald Kagan and urban planner Alexander Garvin were towering figures in their chosen fields and fixtures at Yale for decades.

Garvin and his bowties took the train up from his day jobs in New York City government under five mayors to teach Study of the City on Tuesday nights. In the wake of Watergate and amid mounting evidence of New York’s municipal dysfunction, Garvin’s class demonstrated a useful role for the public sector. I earned my first A in that class, writing a term paper comparing two NYU housing blocks south of Washington Square Park. Later I lived in that neighborhood, and then in Washington’s Capitol Park South, the first US urban renewal area, a fact I learned in Garvin’s class.

Thanks to Garvin, I also began a career in government. I don’t remember the circumstances but I must have reached out to him, and in June 1978, he gave me my first real job, surveying damage from New York’s summer of ‘77 blackout along Broadway in Bushwick, Brooklyn. As I learned in the Department of City Planning report that incorporated that fieldwork, every borough in New York has a street named Broadway that starts at the its waterfront.

Trying make government work for the people took me across the border into Queens, working with retailers on Myrtle Avenue in Ridgewood, to the municipal markets that Fiorello LaGuardia launched to get pushcarts off city streets, to Queens Borough Hall, to Washington and to Tanzania as a US diplomat telling America’s story to the world.

I needed a job back in 1978 thanks in part to Donald Kagan. As a freshman, I got steered to Kagan’s introduction to ancient Greek history, a subject I knew nothing about. At the first lecture, in an auditorium with hundreds of students, it was a clear within minutes that I was in the presence of a truly gifted scholar and teacher. Kagan’s Origins of War course, about what ignited the Peleponnesian War, Second Punic War, World War I and World War II, and what kept the Cuban missile crisis from become a war, made history alive, contemporary and relevant.

Kagan inspired me to attempt multiple majors including classic civilization. I even went to summer school to try to learn ancient Greek.

When my triple major dream crumbled at the end of my junior year, I approached Kagan with a different idea. I asked for his approval to complete my senior paper over the summer and graduate early. Kagan, who thought more of my newspaper work than my scholarship, agreed to oversee my paper and arrange the administrative details, saving my family about $6,000 in tuition.

Like me, Kagan was a working class kid from New York who drank the Yale Kool-Aid. Kagan shuddered at the prospect of something ruining such a uniquely blessed place, the way the Athenians had destroyed their own. He didn’t want to see that happen to Yale, and he didn’t want to see it happen to America.

His attitudes could be a bit ancient. He left Cornell because he believed it knuckled under to student protest demands for a Black Studies curriculum. He opposed the option to allow undergraduates to take up to four to their required 36 courses as Pass/Fail, rather than for a grade, to stop the “unmanning of Yale students.” His turn as dean went sideways over a proposed new Western Civilization curriculum that was more well endowed than received.

Conservative to his core, Kagan believed in preserving the essential values of society and passing them down the generations. Garvin believed tearing something down could lead to building something better. Their teachings and their kindness have helped shape my life.

Former US diplomat and broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a columnist for ICE 365, a contributor to Forbes and Inside Asian Gaming, columnist/correspondent for Asia Times, and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

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