This is the time of year for reflections, and I’m certainly no exception to the rule. So here goes (though I don’t usually talk much about myself on this blog): In 2009, I finished studying abroad at the London School of Economics and fell even more deeply in love with London and LSE. I also…
I ran across this really excellent post the other day, by Lola Adesioye. I love this quote from her: I have spent many column inches and airtime talking about the shoulda, woulda and the couldas of life. And don’t get me wrong – I enjoy it! But I also ask myself how much of a…
I just ran across this fascinating Time interview with Stephen Rapp, who was previously chief prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone (H/T Shelby Grossman). Rapp states: The concern all of us had was that we were conducting justice in a comfortable courtroom with long trials and well-paid attorneys. Prisoners had single cells, and…
An old man walks along a beach and sees a young boy throwing something into the water. As he approaches, he sees hundreds of starfish lining the beach, washed in from the tide. The young boy is rushing around, throwing the starfish back into the water one by one. The old man asks why he…
I have just put down “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books” (It was a very disjointed book; I don’t recommend it unless you are an enormous fan of James, Nabokov, Austen, Fitzgerald. Even then, I believe her analysis of these works is somewhat cursory.) The book is about oppression during the Islamic Republic…
Maybe it’s just me, but I increasingly see a problem with activism: it can easily slip from passion to elitism. I’ll be honest; as I became more passionate about human rights issues, I started feeling incredibly upset. I started wondering: “Why doesn’t everyone else care? How can they hear about genocide, conflict, women’s rights, torture,…
