Archive for the ‘Shoptalk’ Category
‘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 [...]
Actually, Nick Kristof, this is a damn good point.
One more thing on this “Nick Kristof named a 9-year-old rape victim!” controversy. In my, “Thanks for your time in the middle of Congo, Nick Kristof” email, I mentioned I’d face a similar, though totally unscrutinized, decision in Liberia last year. He replied that he had too — and he’d not used a girl’s name, [...]
When can you name rape victims? Nick Kristof replies
This is the first of a two posts about this. Mostly because I wrote this, went to bed at 2 am, then I got up to another email from Nick Kristof. Thanks, Nick, for taking the time to talk with me about this. Readers might want to see Part II.
There was a bit of a [...]
I’ve got a new website! Here’s how it works
As most of you have probably figured out by now, I’ve got a new website, designed by the one-man-genius-shop that is Cleave Design. Adam did a great job adapting the tools that made this redesign affordable to make the website do all kinds of fun things I’d hoped to have done, and that probably should [...]
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [