Archive for the ‘The Wide World’ Category
Paris by my eye, 2005
I took French in high school over Spanish for a singular reason: West Laurens actually had a sister city in France, and did an exchange program every other year. In my junior year, my family hosted two French teenage boys in our home for a week, and then the people of Gerardmer, France returned the [...]
January 9th, 20122011 [a year like no other] and its place in history
I have read two articles in the last week whose arguments have begun with Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay The End of History, which argued that as we reached the final demise of the U.S.S.R., “liberal democracy had triumphed and become the undisputed evolutionary end point toward which every national system was inexorably moving: fundamental political ferment was over [...]
December 27th, 2011Among reindeer
Nils Peder kneels among his reindeer This week I have finally been able to open my October and November issues of National Geographic and I was awestruck by the November story on the Sami people of northern Sweden. Their wardrobe and striking faces radiate against the harsh landscape of the region where they live–blanketed all [...]
November 22nd, 2011Telling stories without paper: human voices and created objects
Incidentally, the third class I’m taking this semester is Exhibit Planning and Production, and we are designing an exhibit to go in cases like this one, in Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, in their E Terminal. Without realizing it earlier, this semester I am in two courses that I have been extremely excited to take, and that [...]
August 31st, 2011Tell it right, and a western can make me cry.
I have always been a sucker for a good story. The simplest tale, told in the right way, brings me to tears. It is almost silly how often I have found myself sitting in the movie theater at the end of a great film, or even a mediocre one, and suddenly, some small trigger in the narrative, [...]
June 23rd, 2011Instead of reading for class…
… I’ve been reading a good old travelogue, like those which sustained my interest for a few years, when I first discovered the Travel Essays section of the bookstore, until I realized that mostly, that shelf does not have new releases very often, and I had read all the best ones already. The rest, I [...]
June 12th, 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, 2011A betrayal of identity: the dramatic unveiling of baby-stealing in Spain, and the lives that have been forever scarred
I have been thinking a lot about adoption lately. It is a subject that really fascinates me. I like the idea of scrambling things we think we know–like biology and genetics and “family”–and giving them far greater parameters. Over Christmas break, I read a book about the diaspora of Chinese daughters over the past twenty [...]
April 4th, 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, 2011