What exactly is a profile? It’s a sketch in charcoal of the simplified contours of a face. So writes today’s guest, Moustafa Bayoumi.

By definition a profile draws an incomplete picture. It substitutes recognition for detail, Bayoumi writes. It’s what an outsider observes of the conflict in Congo, for example. We see the war-lord, the tribal leaders, the corruption, the poverty, the death. They're African problems we come to recognize and normalize, just like hot weather or drought.

It's ninety years since the armistice that ended the war that was to end all wars.

Seen from the outside only in wobbly line drawing, wars are easy to recognize but not what comes first. Nine decades later is it too much to imagine that we can learn to look a little deeper? Is it only brutal dictatorships, or also brutal economic policies that lead to slaughter? Can we learn to recognize trouble not at the first murder by machete but with the killing of schools, of hospitals of jobs, of hope?

That would be a good way to mark Armstice Day.