By Issandr El Amrani for The London Review of Books, February 4

Issandr is a  successful free-lancer who has been based in Cairo for 11 years; I've followed his work since around 2004 when he used to occasionally participate on a news forum I frequented and I think highly of it. He was in Tunisia getting a grasp of events there until a rushed return to Cairo on Jan. 28, so he is uniquely qualified to compare the two revolutions.  (Here's an op-ed he did for The Guardian Jan. 18:  After Tunisia, Arab leaders must stop preying on fear of chaos.  And here's a piece he did Jan. 30, also for The Guardian, regarding ominous signs in Morocco.)

Here's a good short bio. for Issandr.

A taste from the LRB essay

....That the military should find itself in this position represents a colossal failure, primarily of the elaborate police state it had established over the last few decades precisely in order to distance itself, as an institution, from the day-to-day repression that kept the regime in place and ensured that no viable opposition leadership could emerge....

...a security establishment estimated to employ, including informants, up to two million people, formed a parallel government, defusing dissent at a local level. It was security personnel, and not cabinet ministers, who negotiated with striking workers and contained the demonstrations by the anti-Mubarak movements that sprang up after 2005 ....

....Egyptians with any public standing – politicians, businessmen, journalists – had a security handler, a relationship that served to intimidate, reward and guide....

The result was a political ecosystem with much more flexibility than existed in Tunisia under Ben-Ali, but this flexibility had its limits, and the system proved surprisingly unable to adapt when faced with a leaderless protest movement. It turned out that the biggest weakness of the Egyptian opposition – its inability to produce a charismatic leader with wide public appeal – was also its strength....

If you use his group blog, Arabist.net, to guide what you're reading on Egypt, you won't be sorry--he and his associates there seem to be catching every really good article being written on the topic, sorting through the dross for people with less time to spend.  I can't recommend it highly enough after checking it more regularly than usual for the last week. Every single link I've found there has been extremely worthwhile, including what he tweets and retweets on his Twitter feed. And he adds commentary that deconstructs spin coming from all sides, one of my favorite things.