Recent blog posts

Kei Miller’s second novel, The Last Warner Woman (published in 2010 but released in the United States earlier this year) seems to strike up a dialogue with his first novel The Same Earth (2008), while dismantling the earlier novel’s assump

That is what the Bishop of Reykjavik told the “Undersigned” (from then onwards known as “EmBi”: Emissary of the Bishop) in Halldór Laxness’ strange novel Under the Glacier. I had begun reading the book in 2009 and it took me slightly over three years to finish a “simple” 200-pages novel.

by Glenn Petersen

Their meeting made for some uncomfortable visuals as Liberia's President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf defended a national law that criminalized homosexuality in front of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, long an advocate for gay rights, who was visiting Liberia in his capacity as the founder of the African Governance Initiative (AGI), a nonprofit dedicated to building the capacity of African governments.  But the terse exchange masked a deeper, more serious question: should Western leaders try to impose their mora

BEIJING - About a week and a half ago a co-worker sent a message in Chinese that army vehicles were spotted in east-central Beijing near where I used to live. That day and the next rumors swirled, in no part due to the fact that Bo Xilai, the Mayor of Chongqing, the largest city in China had recently been dismissed. In subsequent days there have been articles in a multitude of news sources about Bo Xilai, following earlier articles about Wang Lijun, his dismissed police chief who created news by fleeing to the United States Embassy in the nearby city of Chengdu.

Views of the Kony2012 campaign launched by Invisible Children (IC) have drastically fallen after its initial premiere on 5 March and the subsequent backlash. On 16 March, IC founder and star of the video Jason Russell was back in the news after having a breakdown in San Diego. The rhetorical space for advocacy around the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been eroded. The work of IC, in its own right, has largely been discredited and oversimplified.

Back in Srinagar after a year, the first thing I noticed was packs of dogs hanging at every nook and cranny. A few dogs ran after us while boarding the car at the airport. The dogs looked well fed and territorial. They ran snarling through streets – a sight which should be unusual for any city that claims to be well-administered. As the dogs hurled past squirming people, grimy and emaciated children with huge flailing gunny bags were raking through mountains of debris lining the road. We hit a traffic jam that that did not open for almost an hour.

MASERU, Lesotho – Last week was one filled with nostalgia and melancholy.