Sri Lanka vs Darfur: How We Read Conflict

*(reader note: since lots of my recent traffic seems to have an infants sense of irony, I’m marking anything I said ironic  with asterisks. ****)
I was asked in an interview recently why the Sri Lankan conflict (which has about 1/2 the deaths + 1/3 of the refugees of the Darfur crisis – 95% of the [...]

Check Out my Awesome Slideshow

I am consistantly amazed at how much i get to do whatever i want.

the things i like to write about (are weird)

From time to time, when I am writing, I have this thought—which I occasionally post on FB:
“sometimes i sit down and i write some shit and i think, holy mother of G-d i am a sick, terrible person. at least i’m thin”
Usually in those exact words . Anyone who knows me knows that i write [...]

3WI Special Report—Why they’re not listening to us

We spout off a lot about human voices and narratives and shit, but I’d rather read a bunch of solid numbers behind a single, strong argument than see another Maya/Fatima/Yelena, etc propped up in front of a camera and poked with a stick until she spills her unimaginably brutal survival story for another wannabe foreign correspondent’s lede. Human beings are the ONLY way to tell a story, especially a foreign story, but only if you treat them like humans instead of units of commoditized suffering. Anything else is just prostitution, and nobody likes a fucking pimp.

Did I mention? Brooklyn Hacks

“I have customers who used to work in the offices around here,” said Aamir Ajaz, the perpetually smiling face behind the counter at Lahore Deli, a closet-sized SoHo eatery with a loyal following of taxi drivers. “Now they come in and they’re driving cabs.”

Did I mention–Adios Puebla York

Check out my most recent article at The Brooklyn Ink , Adios Brooklyn, about Mexican immigrants leaving New York

Terrorist, moi? Why the Maya Arulpragasam LTTE-drama is NYT Tiger-shit

The fact that it takes an emphatically pregnant young rapper who samples Bollywood and AK47s, writes songs about Bird Flu and does Day-Glo animal-print schizophrenia as an ethos rapping with Jay-Z on her due date to make us stand up and take notice of a conflict an order of magnitude more deadly than the one in Gaza should say something about us, not her.

2008: the Year of Schadenfreude

So, here we are, ending 2008 like we started it here at 3rdworldimagineer—sick as a dog. Granted, the Jan 08′ vintage was a tad stronger than the ‘09 looks to be (unless the Berkeley Department of Public Health has something to share with the class) but it’s still enough to knock us on our ass, [...]

I MADE THIS

Here’s the article I wrote for Sunday’s New York Times. Read it and weep, haters. For everybody else, please enjoy!

Making sense of Mumbai

Today’s post is inspired in part by the SAJA-coordinated lecture series “Understanding the Mumbai Attacks”, moderated by Rome Hartman, with Mira Kamdar, Mr. Rushdie, and one of this 3rdworldimagineer’s favorite journalists, Mr. Suketu Mehta.
The lecture was notable for many things, but what struck me most was the blatant emotionalism that charged the speakers and audience [...]