A version of this is up at Mother Jones, but this one is too hard for the homepage.
Oh the keffiyeh. How long have I waited, in vain, for you to die? Before it was the emblem of the hipster generation, the keffiyeh (spelled many ways but worn only one) was the preferred and only headdress for PLO leader [...]
Lots o’ stuff going on in South Asia this week! Tata unveils the Nano, world’s cheapest car (cue whine-track from self-serving American environmental movement) U.N. announces Humanitarian Crisis in Sri Lanka (cue crickets). Orphanage in Bangladesh actually a terror cell? Because there’s so much to say about each (!) I’ve split the posts.
Lanka Lanka Lanka:
While [...]
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.
*I post this out of love, because even (and often) the most earnest among us are also the most absurd.
I was trolling Facebook as I often do when i came across a friend’s photo album from a recent Gaza mish. I am sharing this in violation of my own rules to make a point about [...]
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.
Dear Readers,
There is so much going on! First the inauguration, then the Clinton confirmation and Caroline Kennedy’s graceful departure from the NY Senate contest. Israel once again departed the Gaza Strip. One might almost forget there was a whole EARTH out there full of other shit going on.
Since all you’ve been reading about is a) [...]
FACT:
There are, on average, 1,000 foreign correspondents reporting from Israel and the occupied territories–a nation with about the same geographic size and population as New Jersey–at any given time. In times of war, like right now, the number swells to upwards of 3,000.
Consider, then, that on the entire continent of Africa–the world’s second most populace continent after Asia– with its myriad wars, legions of corrupt governments, genocides, AIDS and MDRTB, pirates, inflation, starvation and hotbeds of militant fundamentalism, there are an average of 900.
3rdworldimagineer