Archive for the ‘Vignettes’ Category
From the tops of water towers, a little New York nostalgia
I just went digging for some clips and realized two of my favorite America stories aren’t on my website. So I’d like to introduce you to them. In 2008, I wrote one of many, many stories about the one-year anniversary of the heroics of Wesley Autrey, the ‘subway hero’ who threw himself in front of [...]
Witchcraft: Getting better all the time
Principles of the poorest performing schools in South Africa are blaming witchcraft for their students’ lackluster marks. Apparently, the students are suspicious of each other, and the pesky ones are bewitching their classmates. I found this little tidbit via @baldaufji, but the best part was the first reader comment: now this we can’t discount as [...]
What WordPress wonders about Cote d’Ivoire
Most of the time, the funny things on that list of “things people searched to get to my blog” isn’t all that different from the funny things that most blogs catalog on their back end, I would guess. But this little couplet, made of two separate search items, seems worth sharing:
From the other side of Africa, the world through new eyes
One of my favorite readers* sent me this blog post recently, by a young woman who upped to Mali for a month after graduating from school. On the blogs I circle, we talk a lot about the relative value to Noble Goals of generalists and specialists and good-intentionalists, about the risk of havoc that lurks [...]
A poetic pause for “The Brown Man’s Burden”
TexasinAfrica recently pointed me to a poem I hadn’t seen before, and I basically think it should be required reading for anyone in aid, development or journalism that writes about either of those (and so many other) things. The poem is by Henry Labouchère, at times a journalist, at times an art critic, at times [...]
Quote of the day
From my ever-increasing Vault of Thus Far Unused Reportage A Burundian man described to me meeting some people from Belgium, who were befuddled by the whole Hutu-Tutsi thing. “They said, ‘How do you tell who is what?’ “I said, ‘We are using the criteria you set up.’”
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [