background preloader

The World

Facebook Twitter

The Great Rift. Essays In the span of about a week, starting on December 30, 2007, the day that President Mwai Kibaki stood awkwardly in an ill-fitting suit in the backyard of the Nairobi statehouse, Bible in hand, and had himself sworn in after a rigged election, Kenya went from one of the most orderly countries in sub-Saharan Africa to a war zone. The violence was as terrible as it was swift, but the real shock was that it could happen here at all. Kenya had just held two back-to-back national elections, in 2002 and 2005, that were widely praised as free and fair. According to pre-election polls, most Kenyans were backing the opposition candidate, Raila Odinga, and they were expecting a peaceful transfer of power, which has happened only a few times in Africa, but Kenya was thought to be the happy exception, and for good reason.

Chief eventually found the burned church, picked a nearby cornfield, and put us down nicely. Police? And what does the state actually deliver? What Sex Means for World Peace - By Valerie M. Hudson. In the academic field of security studies, realpolitik dominates. Those who adhere to this worldview are committed to accepting empirical evidence when it is placed before their eyes, to see the world as it "really" is and not as it ideally should be.

As Walter Lippmann wrote, "We must not substitute for the world as it is an imaginary world. " Well, here is some robust empirical evidence that we cannot ignore: Using the largest extant database on the status of women in the world today, which I created with three colleagues, we found that there is a strong and highly significant link between state security and women's security. In fact, the very best predictor of a state's peacefulness is not its level of wealth, its level of democracy, or its ethno-religious identity; the best predictor of a state's peacefulness is how well its women are treated. What's more, democracies with higher levels of violence against women are as insecure and unstable as nondemocracies. Paintballing with Hezbollah. Photos by Bryan Denton Hezbollah members getting in position right before a match starts. It’s almost like they’ve done this before or something. We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all.

But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this “friendly” paintball match. The battle takes place underground in a grungy, bunker-like basement underneath a Beirut strip mall. As my eyesight returns and readjusts to the dim arena light, I poke out from my position behind a low cinder-block wall. Instead, they shoot me three times, point-blank, right in the groin. From this distance (well within the 15-foot “safety zone”), paintballs feel like bee stings. Just before hostilities begin, Team Sahafi lines up for a group shot. Ali had sworn that he’d deliver honest-to-God trained fighters for an evening of paintball, but when the four-man Hezbollah team first walked into the building, I was dubious. Why is the Muslim World So Easily Offended? There is an Arab pain and a volatility in the face of judgment by outsiders that stem from a deep and enduring sense of humiliation.

A vast chasm separates the poor standing of Arabs in the world today from their history of greatness. In this context, their injured pride is easy to understand. In the narrative of history transmitted to schoolchildren throughout the Arab world and reinforced by the media, religious scholars and laymen alike, Arabs were favored by divine providence. They had come out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century, carrying Islam from Morocco to faraway Indonesia. In the process, they overran the Byzantine and Persian empires, then crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Iberia, and there they fashioned a brilliant civilization that stood as a rebuke to the intolerance of the European states to the north.

If Islam’s rise was spectacular, its fall was swift and unsparing. But woe to the outsider who ventures onto that explosive terrain. The floodgates had opened. The round world made flat. IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTURE, intellectual celebrity requires the ability to hear the ideological background music of the historical moment, and to play effortlessly in tune with it. Some people have a special knack for this: One thinks of Francis Fukuyama announcing “the end of history” when the Soviet Union fell, or Malcolm Gladwell celebrating the value of snap judgments (in Blink) to the leaders of recently downsized corporations. The key move is to avoid any discussion of power or class relations, of political or social conflict, in favor of apparently neutral and impersonal forces. In recent decades, there has been a powerful resurgence of deterministic schemes—technological, biological, environmental—all exuding an aura of scientific inevitability as they claim to explain centuries of historical change.

Jared Diamond is nothing if not a celebrity intellectual, though he achieved that status somewhat late in life. The case of Haiti provided the most egregious example. Vanishing Languages. Tuvan The Compassion of Khoj Özeeri One morning in early fall Andrei Mongush and his parents began preparations for supper, selecting a black-faced, fat-tailed sheep from their flock and rolling it onto its back on a tarp outside their livestock paddock. The Mongush family’s home is on the Siberian taiga, at the edge of the endless steppes, just over the horizon from Kyzyl, the capital of the Republic of Tuva, in the Russian Federation. They live near the geographic center of Asia, but linguistically and personally, the family inhabits a borderland, the frontier between progress and tradition. Tuvans are historically nomadic herders, moving their aal—an encampment of yurts—and their sheep and cows and reindeer from pasture to pasture as the seasons progress. The elder Mongushes, who have returned to their rural aal after working in the city, speak both Tuvan and Russian.

Tuvan is one of the many small languages of the world. Who can blame them? Aka The Respect of Mucrow Seri. Ghosts of the Tsunami · LRB 6 February 2014. I met a priest in the north of Japan who exorcised the spirits of people who had drowned in the tsunami. The ghosts did not appear in large numbers until later in the year, but Reverend Kaneda’s first case of possession came to him after less than a fortnight. He was chief priest at a Zen temple in the inland town of Kurihara. The earthquake on 11 March 2011 was the most violent that he, or anyone he knew, had ever experienced. The great wooden beams of the temple’s halls had flexed and groaned with the strain. Power, water and telephone lines were fractured for days; deprived of electricity, people in Kurihara, thirty miles from the coast, had a dimmer idea of what was going on there than television viewers on the other side of the world.

But it became clear enough, when first a handful of families, and then a mass of them, began arriving at Kaneda’s temple with corpses to bury. Nearly twenty thousand people had died at a stroke. ‘My life had returned to normal,’ he told me. ‘Divorce? It's All About the Cow. Windhoek, Namibia “Okay ladies, let me see you walk like a cow!” Utji Muinjangue cried. A dumb look passed between artist Simone Leigh and me as we stepped onto the runway of the tiled corridor leading from the back of the house. Long-​horned headpieces, fashioned from teal and turquoise animal print, and a sherbet pink and blue mélange of chiffon, that matched our dresses, balanced on the front lobe of our heads so that the rhinestone brooches at their center blinked like a third eye. I felt mine slip under my soft Afro. “Don’t worry! I made cautious steps, maneuvering three layers of white lace petticoats and a bright-​colored underskirt beneath the wide hem of a dress that fell at the toe of borrowed heels.

“Like a cow …” “I don’t know, I just feel like this needs a little more—​it needs to be fuller. We were wearing traditional dresses of Herero women, an ethnic group found mainly in Namibia and Angola. As we stepped into the living room, the small crowd there clapped approval. Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In, Sage Publications, London, 2006 | Paul James. Where Masturbation and Homosexuality Do Not Exist - Alice Dreger. When sex means reproduction, certain proclivities may simply not be part of cultural models of sexuality. Aka father carrying his daughter while out on a hunt [Courtesy of Barry Hewlett] Barry and Bonnie Hewlett had been studying the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa for many years before they began to specifically study the groups' sexuality. As they reported in the journal African Study Monographs, the married couple of anthropologists from Washington State University "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night.

At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women and they verified the men's assertions. " In turning to a dedicated study of sex practices, the Hewletts formally confirmed that the campfire stories were no mere fish tales. The Aka and Ngandu speak of sex as "searching for children. " Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World. The Weirdest People in the World. In John They Trust | People & Places.