Archive for the ‘Shoptalk’ Category
Creepiest Google searcher ever, and a confidentiality conundrum
Like a lot of bloggers, weird Google search terms will send people my way. I used the word “thighs” in a blog headline once, and now every week I get a few people who I’m pretty sure are just looking for porn. Awesome.
But here’s a Google search term that’s also a reminder of how important [...]
Farm aid from space
This is the title of my newest Christian Science Monitor article, which is actually about weather-indexed insurance programs in sub-Saharan Africa. All kinds of cool science-and-tech stuff has come together in the last five years to allow big insurance companies to offer super-small insurance policies — low-premiums, comparatively low-payout, to the usually poor, always vulnerable [...]
Why German homeschoolers get asylum and torture survivors don’t
I don’t know, actually. Maybe Uwe Romeike got lucky? Maybe asylum is starting to change? Maybe judges like evangelicals? Or white people better than black people? Or maybe we just really, <em>really</em> hate the European Court of Human Rights?
In late January, A US immigration judge in Memphis, Tenn., recently granted asylum to a German [...]
‘How we know waterboarding works,’ by the CIA
Remember that guy who went on ABC and said, “Waterboarding works. One douse, and this al Qaeda guy totally opened up.” (Okay, maybe it went more like this: “From that day [we waterboarded him] on, he answered every question. The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”)
His [...]
Is anyone on the Internet under 30?
I gave a talk yesterday in the stellar Rosemary Armao’s upper-class undergraduate journalism class at SUNY-Albany. As an aside, Rosemary Armao is a woman of steel organs of your favorite type — an investigative journalist who works tirelessly in the Balkans (one of those many pesky world regions where knowledge is often more fear [...]
Does charity work like carbon offsets?
First, let me just say that it sounds like carbon offsets are a guilt salve more than anything else. If you saw the piece in Harper’s Magazine, it’s hard to be optimistic that offsetting carbon does much more than make lay people feel guilty and make smart people scheme about how to create another [...]
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [