Notable
Lists of 2007
Photo by Chaabee Dheefa.
Here are some noteworthy year-end lists from 2007:
Highlights from Savage Minds (my other blog).
List of Scandalized Administration Officials.
The Bush administration’s dumbest legal arguments of the year.
The year in media errors.
Top 25 Censored Stories.
A year of world changing ideas.
Some of the best photos on Flickr in 2007 (from which the above picture was […]
Serendipity
I told myself last night that I should fill up the gas tank before setting out this morning. The drive up the mountain to the lake burns a bit of fuel and the tank was nearly empty when we got back from dinner. But I was too foggy headed in the morning and it completely […]
Office
In India, on January 12th, around one thirty in the morning, back from a long day of filming which had involved over nine hours of driving, I fired up my iBook just before going to bed. Thats when I got the email that would turn our lives upside down: I had been appointed as assistant […]
Shelter
Guest post by tf
Since December 21st, Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) has been distributing tents to homeless people in Paris.
Dr Françoise Jeanson, President of Médecins du Monde, writes, in her letter of December 22nd (my translation):
These tents are not a solution, they symbolize the absence of a solution.
By that date, ten homeless people […]
Poonam
When I took this picture I didn’t know the name of the girl. Now I do. It is Poonam, and she wants to be a doctor when she grows up. The thing is, she is now 14 and that is the time when most girls in Chharanagar get married. Her older brother was pressuring her […]
Acting Like a Thief
Announcing Acting Like a Thief! Now available as a free BitTorrent download or, for a $50 donation, as a DVD.
Acting Like a Thief is a short film about the Budhan Theatre of Chharanagar. Starting with playwright Dakxin Bajrange discussing his arrest , the film brings us inside the lives of a dedicated group of young […]
Hooch and Hamlet
This December, Shashwati and I are going to India to shoot a documentary film about the residents of one city’s slum who are using theatre to fight back against decades of prejudice and police oppression.
Help us tell their story.
Even though we are paying our own way to India, we need to raise $15,000 to cover […]
Peking Man
This post was occasioned by a news article, discovered on Howard French’s blog, about a recent Chinese study which “found that Chinese ancestors set off from northeast Africa about 50,000 years ago.” This story is momentous not so much for its contribution to science as it is with regard to the politics of race in […]
Why?
I tried mailing a document to a friend in Arizona. It got returned. Why?
We regret that your mail is being returned to you because of heightened security measures. All domestic mail, weighing 16 ounces or over, that bears stamps …. MUST be presented to a retail clerk at a post office.
Like “Chemical Ripi” I was […]
Dissertation
No need to wait for the book, the curious can download my dissertation right now:
Learning “Local” Languages: Passive Revolution, Language Markets, and Aborigine Education in Taiwan
This dissertation examines contemporary linguistic markets and language policy in Taiwan in terms of the historical processes of state formation, class alliances, and identity politics, drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theory […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
