August 2012
77 posts
2 tags
July 2012
82 posts
4 tags
“I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front...”
– Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
Monday First Sentences | Every Monday, we offer the opening sentences of a Penguin Classic to start the week.
(via classicpenguin)
5 tags
4 tags
3 tags
4 tags
3 tags
6 tags
Film: How an amazing art museum came to Uzbekistan
In a remote desert in north western Uzbekistan, a small, unpretentious museum houses one of the world’s most remarkable collections of 20th century Russian art. Worth many millions of dollars, the collection is a treasure trove of once banned Soviet art and testament to a small group of artists and art lovers, who risked torture, imprisonment and death to create and protect these unique...
4 tags
“This confusion about the salience of motive came up in the torture debates of...”
– M.S., writing in the Economist
6 tags
National Geographic launches Pine Ridge...
Photo: Native American jazz musician Frederick Whiteface.
Together we built this community storytelling project so that the people of Pine Ridge could author their own story. This new relationship between the story subject and the publication opens up a new kind of transparency and dialog rarely seen in mainstream journalism today.
7 tags
“A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon is a distortion of reality and...”
– Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism
4 tags
4 tags
The Capster, a breathable hijab for sports, that...
The Capster, a breathable hijab made for sporting purposes, which may pave the way for more Muslim women to participate in competitive sports.
4 tags
penamerican:
Broughton asked Stanford what he learned from living among African Americans—far from a common situation for an affluent white youth in 1950s Tennessee. Stanford’s answer was brief: “How shitty white people were to them.”
From Ben Ehrenreich’s “The Long Goodbye,” a great essay on poet Frank Stanford.
3 tags
3 tags
“He taught me early that the value of a dish is the pleasure it brings you; where...”
– Anthony Bourdain, “A Man of Simple Needs” (via verbosevina)
3 tags
6 tags
“What separates a free country from a repressive one is the way government and...”
– M.S., writing in The Economist
4 tags
4 tags
PEN Prison Writing: Frederic Bertoff, "Chessman's...
penamerican:
“…stripped now, as we all were, of shield and sword // I poke at my salad”
Frederic Bertoff was awarded third place in Poetry in PEN’s 2012 Prison Writing Contest. Read the poem in its entirety here.
6 tags
Enoh Meyomesse: My Time in Kondengui Prison →
penamerican:
Enoh Meyomesse is the author of 15 books and a founding member of the Cameroon Writers Association. In October 2011, he ran for office against President Paul Biya, but had his candidacy revoked after the government claimed he did not properly register. On November 22, 2011, Meyomesse was…
2 tags
3 tags
4 tags
“[A]n Open Wireless Movement will also need to do technical work: we need to...”
– Why We Need An Open Wireless Movement | Electronic Frontier Foundation
3 tags
1 tag
2 tags
Pwning the Media →
futurejournalismproject:
Much has been written about how we can verify sources and information in a social media age.
Not so much about how journalists — like most human creatures — are a rather lazy group and say, for instance, might skip a step or three in the process of story assignment to story publication.
Which is what Ryan Holiday took advantage of as he became an expert on pretty much...
2 tags
“To speak means, above all, to assume a culture, to support the weight of a...”
– These words were written by the French-Algerian theorist, philosopher, psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), who would be turning 87 today.
In his outstanding book Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon describes through a post-colonial lens the experiences of the black male in a state...
2 tags
4 tags
5 tags
CBLDF » Tunisian Man Loses Free Expression Appeal... →
On March 28, Jabeur Mejri, a Tunisian man convicted of upsetting public order and morals, was sentenced to seven years in jail after posting cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad on Facebook. Last week, he learned that the court would not overturn his sentence. This decision comes just two weeks after Salafi Islamists violently protested an art exhibition they found insulting. Though many hoped that...
7 tags
arikaeli:
“Same Love” - a song for marriage...
6 tags
6 tags
: An Interview with Rotimi Babatunde, 2012 Caine... →
penamerican:
Rotimi Babatunde, Chair of the Nigerian PEN Center’s Writers for Peace Committee, recently won the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing for his story “Bombay’s Republic”. The Prize was founded in 2000 to celebrate the richness and diversity of African writing in English.
“Bombay’s…
4 tags
AI: Omani activists sentenced as crackdown on free...
© ROBIN UTRECHT/AFP/Getty Images
The Omani authorities must drop the charges against a number of activists facing prison sentences merely for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression, Amnesty International said today. In the latest case on Monday, a court in the capital Muscat sentenced five activists to jail terms of between one year and 18 months on charges including...
4 tags
The state of libraries in Haiti - ALA
While Haiti Library Relief dollars are making a difference, the need is so vast that the American Library Association has to focus this effort on specific sustainable projects that will advance the nation’s recovery from one of the largest natural disasters on record. ALA has raised $55,000 for Haiti library reconstruction, and $35,000 has already been disbursed to specific building projects.
...
2 tags
“Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot...”
– Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (via penamerican)
3 tags
“Mandela lent his iconography to certain projects in the hopes it would help the...”
– Ebrahim Fakir, manager of the governance institutions and processes unit at the Electoral Institute for the Sustainability of Democracy in Africa
3 tags
2 tags
5 tags
: PEN: excerpt from Caine Prize story by Rotimi... →
penamerican:
Rotimi Babatunde is the winner of the 2012 Caine Prize for African Writing for his short story “Bombay’s Republic”, a gripping tale of a young Nigerian man swept into World War II as a soldier in the Allied “Forgotten Army.” Babatunde is a playwright and author, as well as the Chair of the…
4 tags
UN Pulse from U.N. Dag Hammarskjöld Library:... →
un-library:
Tomorrow is Nelson Mandela International Day! In November 2009, the UN General Assembly declared 18 July “Nelson Mandela International Day” in recognition of the former South African President’s contribution to the culture of peace and freedom.
General Assembly resolution A/RES/64/13…
4 tags
2 tags
5 tags
6 tags
4 tags
“Taking root in a crack of broken concrete, seeds brought over the walls and wire...”
– Muharrem Erbey, an imprisoned human rights lawyer in Turkey, writing from prison.
You can take action to help Muharrem Erbey.
(via penamerican)
3 tags
40 Twitter Hashtags for Writers →
amandaonwriting:
#amediting posts from people who are editing #amwriting posts from people who are writing #askagent agent questions and answers #author #authors #editing #fictionfriday #fridayflash flash fiction on a Friday #nanowrimo national novel writing month #novels #novelists #poem #poet #poets #poetry #pubtip publication tips #publishing #scifi #selfpublishing #vss very short...
4 tags
The Soccer War: July 14, 1969
You can check out my more detailed review of the book and the memoir Travels with Herodotus here.
penamerican:
Today marks 33 years since the conflict between El Salvador and Honduras erupted during the so-called Soccer War.For an excellent portrayal of the four-day war, check out Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book of the same name. It is actually a collection of reportage by the late Polish...
5 tags
