Archive for the ‘Happening’ Category
Neil turns 20 today
Neil on his third birthday My brother Neil, the third of four and the middle boy in our family, turns 20 today. He is stationed at Guantanamo Bay, where he works as a dental assistant. So proud of this grown-up guy. This was back in his “light bulb head” days.
August 6th, 2011Summer… oh, sweet summer.
Yes, that’s me, on the Caribbean beach in Trinidad, Cuba. May 2011. Man, this summer is turning me, and my world, on our heads. I, who usually starts on research pretty earlier in the semester for papers, have not even settled on topics for my two papers I have to write about Cuba. If you [...]
June 1st, 2011Life lessons, from Cuba
Habana vintage For two weeks, I saw not a single advertisement for a corporation, not a company’s name at all, unless it was under the command of the Cuban government. It is the exact opposite of the shock of those pictures of random Hong Kong or Shanghai alleyways, that flash thousands of signs, brand names, [...]
May 30th, 2011Osama bin Laden brings back to the headlines our ten years of war, complicated emotions, and a distinct era in American life and remembrance
I made a special effort to listen to yesterday’s broadcast of The World, my favorite radio program, as I wanted to listen to as much commentary and reflection on the death of Osama bin Laden as I could. Sunday night became a sweeping stretch: hours of news broadcasts, Twitter basically exploding with records numbers of [...]
May 3rd, 2011Pep talk from mom: find meaning, serve others, survive
Twitter has proved an essential tool for communication in the wake of Japan’s series of disasters, when phone lines and other forms of communication have not been accessible or functioning. Not my mom. Translator Aya Watanabe has been translating tweets coming out of Japan in the weeks following the devastation they have been facing. I [...]
April 18th, 2011Muammar: A note on my mother’s nickname
My mom’s name has been in the news a LOT lately. About six or seven years ago, at some point, she began referring to herself as “Muammar,” a take on Muammar Ghaddafi’s name, but we would most often spell it simply “Momar.” If you hadn’t guessed, this is more than anything a play on the [...]
March 30th, 2011Please excuse my protracted silences
It is unbelievable the kind of things that are unfolding right now in the world. We’ve started air strikes in Libya, and uprisings continue all across the Middle East and North Africa, most recently becoming violent in Syria. (It is rather jarring to think that the tipping point–or rather, the catalyst–for all of this was [...]
March 27th, 2011Trying to understand a boiling water reactor schematic diagram, to begin to understand Japan’s situation
This is the most unbelievable photo I’ve seen from the wreckage in Japan, because the mourning woman is so small compared to earth and its strength. We’re all so helpless in the face of that. Photograph from Asahi Shimbun, Reuters. I found it among National Geographic’s Japan earthquake/tsunami/nuclear coverage. If you’re like me, i.e. NOT [...]
March 15th, 2011The world, “moving irreversibly in the direction of openness”
I have had fairly ambivalent feelings about the Wikileaks drama that has been playing out in the last weeks. On the one hand, my journalistic integrity and my rights as a citizen implore the significance of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. On the other hand, I firmly believe one of our government’s [...]
December 10th, 2010A break from the regular, for a personal reminiscence: my Klingelhutz family
When I was thirteen years old, I drove a four-wheeler into one of the drainage waterways running through a series of farm fields in Annandale, Minnesota. The fields were behind the Klingelhutz’s house, where my Uncle Rick, Auntie Sally, and their three kids lived in a small, cul-de-sac neighborhood; the four-wheeler was theirs. To this [...]
November 2nd, 2010