30th January 2011
What's Happening in Egypt Explained
“This was originally posted at 1:00 p.m. EST on Tuesday. It is being updated and is being kept near the top of the blog. Some of the information near the top of the post may be outdated, and if you’ve been following the story closely, the information at the top will definitely seem very basic. So please scroll to the bottom of the post for the latest.
25th January 2011
Opium Wars
“The grim axiom defining today’s Afghanistan, 85 percent of whose citizens are farmers, is that its economy relies on two dueling revenue streams. One flows from Western aid, in the hopes that the country will renounce the Taliban. The other flows from opium trafficking supported by the Taliban, which use the proceeds to fund attacks on Western troops. Only recently has the Afghan government seemed to take stock of the obvious: For the outside world’s largesse to continue, the national economy’s addiction to opium must end. The poppy fields must be destroyed. But just as this devoutly Muslim nation did not become the world’s leading opium supplier overnight, uprooting Afghanistan’s poppy mind-set promises to be a complicated endeavor.
19th January 2011
The Tragedy of Nepal 2011
“Nepal, as a travel destination, is nothing short of raved about. “The Himalayan Mountains are majestic and the people are the nicest in the world!” was a common travel tidbit I heard. What I found was a developing nation with deep problems becoming worse by the month with tourism hastening the poisoning of the well. The pollution is the worst I have ever seen. Air, land, sound and water, nothing is spared the careless trash. The people are wonderful and also skillful about exploiting the tourist scene.
(Via Kottke)
17th January 2011
Bed 18
“I had flown to Afghanistan to write about women who attempt suicide by setting themselves on fire. Despite the 2001 ouster of the Taliban regime, women still have few opportunities for education and a career. They rarely have input in choosing a husband and little if any say in the mundane decision making of everyday life. The husband and his family dominate. Men rule, women obey. And for some women it becomes too much and they set themselves on fire.
4th January 2011
Bolivia’s Lithium Dreams
“The Salar de Uyuni is as remote and unlikely a place as can be imagined for the world to seek its salvation, or for a host of postmodern ills to find their cure. But that’s just what the newspapers here and the politicians in Bolivia are saying. We want clean energy, guiltless mobility, days upon days of talk time. And the solution to all the things that hold us back and slow us down, that make us feel unsatisfied with ourselves and our endeavors, is waiting just beneath the surface of the salt. The 4,086-square-mile Salar—flat as a billiard table, twice the size of Rhode Island—hides a great treasure. The billions of gallons of mineral-rich brine just below its crystalline surface hold in solution perhaps half the world’s supply of lithium.
13th December 2010
Tourism in Afghanistan
“Hann sells his Afghanistan tours as a chance to see the country’s rugged outback while sleeping on dirty teahouse floors and tackling the country’s roads in minibuses that buck like mechanical bulls. It’s also an opportunity to gamble your life on his instincts and experience in order to be a tourist in a place that barely has any. There are no backpackers or bus-tour day-trippers in Afghanistan, and proximity to danger is the real essence of a Hann trip. His tour is a chance to court your own demise—a short walk on the Hindu Kush’s dark side. If you were lucky, you would feel more alive at the end. If you weren’t? It was best not to think about that.
10th December 2010
Amakusa: Islands of dread
“Some places are born cursed, while others are cursed by the whims of history. It has been Amakusa’s tragedy to suffer both fates. Amakusa’s woes began at birth, in the course of the Paleogene, 65mn-23mn years ago, as volcanoes shaped the islands over millions of years and cursed them with a thin gruel of a soil, fit for millennia only for the coarsest barley, until the arrival of the hardy—but hardly nutritious—sweet potato from the New World in the 16th century.
(via longform.org)
In Search of Lost Paris
“Most cities spread like inkblots; a few, such as Manhattan, grew in linear increments. Paris expanded in concentric rings, approximately shown by the spiral numeration of its arrondissements. Its Neolithic center was fittingly located in what is now the First (leaking into the Fourth): the islands, the Louvre, Les Halles, the Hôtel de Ville. It then spread east to the Marais, north to the foot of Montmartre, west along the Seine, and tentatively south, across the river, to what would become St.-Germain-des-Prés.
9th December 2010
The Lost Canadians
“Dietzler, sixty-seven, is one of about a hundred year-round residents of the Northwest Angle and Islands, a 302-square-kilometre US exclave unwittingly created by the comically unwieldy Article II of the 1818 treaty.
17th November 2010
Going Dutch
“Though the Netherlands is consistently ranked in the top five countries for women, less than 10 percent of women here are employed full-time. And they like it this way. Incentives to nudge women into full-time work have consistently failed. Less than 4 percent of women wish they had more working hours or increased responsibility in the workplace, and most refuse extended hours even when the opportunity for advancement arises. Some women cite the high cost of child care as a major factor in their shorter hours, but 62 percent of women working part time in the Netherlands don’t have young children in the house, and mothers rarely increase their working hours even when their children leave home.
