I first discovered the song “Not an Addict” by K’s Choice in a bar called the Twelfth Apostle in Leuven, Belgium. I’d got to Europe on a Belgian-American government fellowship to research European security and defense after the Cold War. This was 1995. Mostly I interviewed U.S. army captains attached to NATO about what they thought of the Gulf War and whether or not they foresaw Eastern Europe and Russia as ever truly becoming part of the West. NATO’s headquarters is located at the edge of Brussels, so I chose the nearby city of Leuven to station myself in. Leuven is essentially a college town, something like Madison but with grayer skies and fewer snowflakes.
