Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Ai Weiwei: A game of chess and China’s elemental flaw
Ai Weiwei’s self portrait for the Time Person of the Year issue I have been fascinated by Ai Weiwei, the 54-year-old provocative artist and voice of dissidence in China, since May, when I heard an interview with his English translator on one of the my favorite podcasts. He was detained and questioned and kept by the government for 81 [...]
December 26th, 2011Comedy relieves us again from news: “You food-chilling m**%$* f*#$%**”
My brother and I don’t have cable, but I subscribe to Netflix Instant, and he subscribes to Hulu Plus, so we get access to a truly massive amount of material for less than $20/month between the both of us, via the PS3. So, for the first time in about five years, I’ve been able to [...]
August 28th, 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, 2011Guilt, a luxury; and other emotions of someone watching Libya from afar
Many people have been caught in the crossfire in Libya, citizens and also foreigners who had been living and visiting. Photo AP / Hussein Malla As I listen to the newscasts each day on the radio, and watch from afar as the world changes abruptly across North Africa and the Middle East, two things have [...]
March 9th, 2011Great listen: World in Words #114 on political language & Tucson
I’ve lost count how many times a story featured on the World in Words language podcast has shown up on my site, but it continues to be a thoughtfully produced weekly pod that clues me in to stories from the news that I might otherwise have missed. (It’s produced by PRI and WGBH Boston, the [...]
January 19th, 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, 2010“If men were angels, we would need no government”
Madison,"father of the Consitution," wrote a large portion of the Federalist Papers and is one of the founding fathers. He believed man needed government, and even that it could coexist with personal liberty, if done right. So spoke James Madison, on that every pressing question of what to do with governance; how much is good [...]
October 14th, 2010Historian Sean Wilentz on Glenn Beck: “Confounding Fathers”
The Tea Party Historian Sean Wilentz, a professor at Princeton University, was on Fresh Air talking with Terry Gross about the roots of the Tea Party in 1950s Cold War politics. He has an article on it, “The Confounding Fathers: The Tea Party’s Cold War Roots,” in The New Yorker this week as well, on [...]
October 13th, 2010Aww, so the little white girl wants to make a difference? Or: The intimidating world of changing the world
Plenty of young people have dreams of changing the world, making a difference, having a purpose in the wider world. Realizing this goal seems more accessible the more the world shrinks, as if maybe through our interconnectedness and supposed knowledge of each other we can somehow bring about change, that we’ve learned enough to avoid [...]
June 1st, 2010Tamil Tiger warfare via… Rambo: thoughts on the complexity of South Asia
Location: Woodstock, Georgia Subject: the subcontinent; South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh) Reading material: William Dalrymple’s The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters (Oakland: Lonely Planet Publication, 2005) Impetus: Class, History of Modern India and South Asia Dalrymple’s travelogue The strange thing about getting my book list for this class back in January [...]
April 18th, 2010