The book is free for two weeks, via LeanPub,. Go download it. Share it with others. Move it like it's a Rihanna song from Pirate Bay. You know, make it move -- if not Invisible-Children/XMDR-TB viral, at least cold-and-flu-season viral.

Here's the skinny on the book, which you can get here:

The first several chapters provide historical and political context. Adam Branch, Daniel Kalinaki, and Ayesha Nibbe explain the roots of the conflict, and how it has persisted for so many years. Alex Little and Patrick Wegner discuss various attempts to end the conflict through peace negotiations, ICC arrest warrants, and military operations, and why they have not been successful.

Later chapters consider the ethics and effectiveness of awareness campaigns like Kony 2012. Glenna Gordon and Jina Moore draw on their experiences as journalists to critique the video’s portrayal of Africa and the people who live there. Rebecca Hamilton, Laura Seay, Kate Cronin-Furman, and Amanda Taub examine the weakness of “awareness” advocacy. Alanna Shaikh explains the ethical dangers of bad aid work. Teddy Ruge offers a different view of Africa, as a place of dynamic innovation instead of violence and helplessness. And youth activist Sam Menefee-Libey describes his frustration with the tone and substance of the campaign meant to target his generation.

The Committee to Protect Journalists wrote an open letter to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, asking for her to make sure Azango was protected and an investigation of the threats and those who made them was pursued. Amnesty International also called on the Liberian government to pursue an investigation. I went with Azango to the police station, where she spent several hours talking with an inspector and a senior detective and filling out a written statement to start an investigation. But she knew better than to believe much would come of it. As she told me about so many other things, "This, too, is Liberia."

So let's all keep an eye on this.

Jake sent me a link to a great video by an organization called Mama Africa, which has organized a video campaign called "Stop the Pity. Unlock the Potential." You'll find it on their video page, but it's the one below it I want to share. It's about a nine-year-old Tanzanian boy and his uncanny memory for a b-list Schwarzenegger film (sorry, Commando fans). Watch all the way to the end, where the advocacy message is made clear in the text. (Hint: This kid has never been a child soldier.)

I don't know a thing about Mama Africa -- if they're a good organization, or even what exactly they do (I have to go read the about pages) -- but I loved this video.

Check it out. And when you're done, go watch their awesome bi-continental rendition of You Can Call Me Al.

And make it go viral.

Anyway, here's a quick post from the Todee, Liberia, where I spent the day with journalist Mae Azango and several trained traditional midwives. They know something I bet most of us don't: how to get a woman in labor to a local clinic, more than an hour away by foot, when no one owns a car.

RSS/email readers, if you see this, could you let me know? I heard there was a problem... just drop me a comment if this hits your inbox. Thanks!

2.  Three men were killed in Burundi in an exchange of gunfire with the police, the latest in a series of killings that have been documented intermittently since the country's troubled 2010 election.  The UN has confirmed that the FNL, an ex-rebel group and former opposition party, has relocated to Congo, and some observers fear the ongoing gun battles suggest a return to violence with the FNL.

3.  Speaking of: Putin took the Kremlin again, but dozens of opposition politicians won local elections -- including a 20-year-old journalism student, proving these skills might still mean something.

4.  Goma stares down cholera.

5.  On International Women's Day, Kenya's sex workers offer to pay income tax -- to make the point that sex work is as valid as any other work, and to force the government to recognize the practice as a labor. (Kenya, meanwhile, fired 25,000 striking nurses, arguing that nurse strikes endanger patients lives. Twenty-five thousand missing nurses, however, is apparently totally safe.)

6.  The International Peace Institute calls our attention to actually underreported topics, namely, security in West Africa.  In addition to the notorious drug smuggling, IPI draws attention to the scary combination of terrorism, drugs, crime and insurgency in the Sahel region (especially in Mali, it notes, citing a recent UN assessment) and to piracy in the Gulf of Guinea. (That's right.  Pirates advance on great white saviors.  Pirates, checkmate.)

Bonus points for IPI, which tell us what we can do, rather than wring our hands and feel guilty, or not guilty, or guilty about not feeling guilty, or questionable making others feel guilty about the guilt others try to put on them... er... work it out according to whatever made you angriest on the Internet.

So what can we do to stop these two burgeoning crises?  Send planes to the Sahel and patrol boats to the Gulf, says IPI.  And maybe some radar and comms equipment.

That's less a matter of political will than a requisition order.  Who's on it?  (I know, I know, a request ion requires political will.  Yes, yes, clever.)

7.  The UN claims to have met the clean water Millennium Development Goal, and scientists rebut.  The World Bank says the world met the Millennium Development poverty goal.

8.  The maternal mortality MDG, however, looked pretty awful from Gobah, Liberia.  Yesterday, I visited a clinic there -- in the same county as the capital -- that doesn't have a microscope, malaria meds for kids 5-10, or water.  That's right, water.  Read about it over on the project page for our Pulitzer Center collaborative project on reproductive health in Africa later today.

9.  Sam Bell, who knows a thing or two (to say the least) about what it means to do American advocacy on African atrocities, wrote a moving tribute to Representative Donald Payne, a long-time Sudan (and Africa) advocate who died on Tuesday.  Bell's tribute is itself an insightful reflection on some of the challenges of advocacy.

10.  Ashley Judd listened to this awesome radio piece I did about some incredible Congolese women busting through the countryside to bring women's news to the airwaves.  Did you?

If, after all of this, you're still thinking about the LRA, I urge you to read this piece by indefatigable Elizabeth Rubin.  This piece is from 1998, when the LRA was still in Uganda kidnapping children at night.  Not that being in Congo and the CAR and raping women and looting villages is any less of a crime.  Just saying, note the time flashback.  Also, it's amazing journalism. (Thanks Nicholas Thompson for freeing it from behind the New Yorker's paywall.)

Meanwhile, I find these two things to be the most lasting said as the Internet exploded this week.

Photographer Glenna Gordon, who took the only still picture of Invisible Children you've ever seen, was interviewed about the photo by the Washington Post.  Answering a question about whether this IC stuff is all neo-colonial, Gordon said, "I don’t think they think there is a problem with the idea that they are colonial. This photo is the epitome of it, like, we are even going to hold your guns for you."

And novelist Teju Cole said yesterday (on, sigh, Twitter): "The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege."  All those blog posts, and dude gets it right in 140 characters.

Meanwhile, check out these visible women -- an incredible Congolese radio collective of bravery, determination and mix tapes.

1. You took in more than $10 million last year. Of that, $3.3 million appears to be sales from IC merchandise. After all of your expenses -- including nearly $90,000 in salaries each for your two co-founders and your CEO -- and less your liabilities, you are still sitting on more $6.5 million, according to your IRS 990 form.

How exactly do you qualify as a "non-profit"?

(Follow up: How exactly do you sell that many T-shirts?)

2. I'm assuming that the $2.8 million listed on your 990 as being spent overseas is going to the 11,000 war-affected people you say you're helping. I'm wondering why you're sitting on nearly twice as much money and what you intend to do with it.  (Follow up: How much of that went into your video?)

3. You tell the IRS that: "The organization has developed programs Stateside that focus on advocacy and spreading the message to 'do more than just watch.' These initiatives include a biannual film tour, cross-platform media campaigns, and grassroots events."

How exactly is this more than watching?

4. In that little box on the 990 where you're supposed to list all of your key employees as well as your five top paid employees and their hours, I see that you only have three names, of men who reportedly work 55 hours a week. Would you consider me for the other apparent two vacancies for jobs with reasonable leisure time? With more than $414,000 in employee expenses, I assume your benefits package is sensational. And I would add a marked note of gender diversity to your lineup, though sadly we'd all still be very white.

5. I have seen from your video that you are aware of maps.  So we can't blame bad geography for this:

Are you aware that the LRA is not currently in Uganda?  If not, why not?

I'll be spending this International Women's Day in rural Liberia, with Front Page Africa journalist Mae Azango, reporting about traditional midwives and childbirth. Mae's one of the journalists in the Pulitzer Center's Reproductive Health collaborative reporting project.

Liberia is a country with some pretty poor maternal mortality numbers. But this other pattern -- hanging out on this day with dynamic local female journalists -- is a pretty good one.

I joined on last fall as features editor, and we've just published our second issue.  With it has come a redesign of the website, which is also gorgeous.  In fact, the creative geniuses behind this magazine concept are design-world folks, so everything about it is gorgeous.  It almost makes me want to give up words.

Each issue has a theme, and this second issue is about mobility.  Meet the team trying to manufacture the first car on Africa's continent for the tough off-loading needed on so much of the continent.  Follow a motor taxi rider as he investigates those roadside gasoline stands in far-off places, this particular far-off place being the Thai-Vietnam border.  Find out how in the world that matatu system really works -- if anyone knows?  Take a wild journey through the amazing ingenuity behind smuggling drugs from Mexico to the U.S.  (Hint: Secret tunnels that look like acquaducts, Jesus statue made of cocaine...)

Every article in Makeshift is a surprising look beneath the ordinary into the hustle, hacking and straight up inspiration that makes most of the world run.  The magazine was founded by wunderkind Steve Daniels, and has been abley abetted by Myles Estey, about whom I would use the adjective "intrepid" without irony.  I joined on because I loved this as an angle on Africa.  It seemed to get so many places I've been exactly right: that there's a whole world that official things like a census or a work survey or taxes or job training programs don't see.  In fact, it's most of the world.  So follow us -- on twitter, online, in print -- and find out what it looks like.  It might even assuage some of your well-worn cynicism.

If this sounds interesting to you, get in on a subscription... because we sold out of our last issue toute de suite, and when they're gone, they're gone.

Three other things that are awesome:

--A English version of "Bright Brass," the gorgeous multimedia piece ("photofilm," in one of the producers words) by Dutch journalists Laurens Nijzink and Rachel Corner.  I posted this earliest his week, in French with French subtitles, and to great excitement among you all.

--A Mexican family torn apart by violence in the midst of a drug war -- and, allegedly, at the hands of the national Army.

--Why Koreans are planting trees in Mongolia