Politics
One America
The text of John Edward’s Hanover speech reprinted in full (via Crooked Timber): Remarks as Prepared for Delivery: “To Build One America, End the Game” Hanover, New Hampshire August 23, 2007 This election is unlike any we have faced before. The stakes are higher. And the challenges we face as a nation are greater than [...]
Chinese Democracy
Three interesting quotes about democracy in China. Each pointing in a different direction: The first from a Rick Perlstein review of Mann’s The China Fantasy in The Nation: Nicholas Kristof dishonored the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre in 2004, Mann points out, with a column titled “The Tiananmen Victory.” The democracy activists had won: “After [...]
Ousmane Sembène
I only recently learned that Ousmane Sembène, “the ‘father’ of African Cinema” died last month. Sembène was much more radical, much more of a brechtian filmmaker, and much more influential than Michael Moore could ever hope to be. Sembène was a writer who went into filmmaking because of the high rates of illiteracy in his [...]
Responsible Criticism
Reading the reactions to Sicko in the press is an interesting exercise. Almost without exception, including papers from both the left and the right, reviewers feel compelled to adopt the tone of voice of a disapproving adult, condemning Moore for his excesses while reluctantly conceding that the film is important and that these issues need [...]
SiCKO
Here is a quote from FOX News: Filmmaker Michael Moore’s brilliant and uplifting new documentary, “Sicko,” deals with the failings of the U.S. healthcare system, both real and perceived. But this time around, the controversial documentarian seems to be letting the subject matter do the talking, and in the process shows a new maturity. And [...]
Caging
From an interview with Greg Palast, where he argues that both the media and congress are missing the real story behind the US attorney scandal: [Monica Goodling] was trying to tell us something important, but the dim bulbs of the U.S. press and the committee dolts wouldn’t listen. She began by accusing her bosses of [...]
Illiteracy
A few weeks ago Victor Mair wrote a guest post on Language Log implying that China’s high rates of illiteracy could be cured by reforming the script, replacing difficult to learn characters with phonetic spelling. There is lots of good discussion of this topic on Language Hat, and there was a good post on the [...]
Disenfranchised
The following quotes and chart were culled from Jason DeParle’s New York Review of Books article, “The American Prison Nightmare.” The issue has been covered here extensively. Here is a Google search of the Keywords archives for the word “prison.” Black men in their early thirties are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites [...]
Tubed
From Foreign Policy, an article which argues that the same kinds of misleading intelligence which got us into a mess in Iraq, also made a mess of North Korea: Officials in U.S. President George W. Bush’s administration are gingerly walking back from claims that North Korea was secretly building a factory to enrich uranium for [...]
Demolition
The photo shows a young girl in Maninagar preparing lunch. See my Maninagar photo set on Flickr. Her home was bulldozed on February 8th. It was 8th Feb. 2007. It was 12th time. Municipal Corporation people demolish Nomadic people’s huts in Maninagar Area of Ahmedabad city which going to be a Mega City on the [...]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
