More news from Sasha Kramer in Port-au-Prince. --- January 19, 2010 This afternoon, feeling helpless, we decided to take a van down to Champs Mars (the area around the palace) to look for people needing medical care to bring to Matthew 25, the guesthouse where we are staying which has been transformed into a field hospital. Since we arrived in Port au Prince everyone has told us that you cannot go into the area around the palace because of vi...

Here's what I hear from Sasha Kramer, whose small NGO in Cap-Haitien was spared by the quakes and who is now in Port-au-Prince lending a hand. Subject: Songs of grief and solidarity in Port au Prince Apologies if these upcoming posts seem unpolished…that is because they are…we barely have time to write and internet is patchy so I will do what I can to get out information but I don’t promise eloquence... Last night we (myself, Cat Laine, Paul N...

After the floods, after the hurricanes, after coup-after-coup, after you-name-it, now this. Make a gift to Partners in Health (www.pih.org) and earmark it for Haiti. They are fast and they spend as little as possible on overhead. Let's not waste time. Below, some details from Ophelia Dahl, director of Partners In Health. --

With places it is the same as with people: either you click right away or never. When I entered Beijing for the first time last October, I knew right away that no romance would ever be possible between me and that scraggly place. But Hong Kong was love at first glance. The very palpable contrast between Hong Kong and the People’s Republic definitely helped my instantaneous fascination, since everything on Hong Kong soil exuded freedom and pl...

Pretending, for the occasion, to have a Central Committee, the journal Tel Quel sent a delegation to China in the spring of 1974. Spring 1974: the campaign “to critique Lin Biao and Confucius” was in full spate, and any pauses in the chorus of blame could be filled with the detestable names of Khruschev (revisionist!) and Liu Shaoqi (capitalist-roader!). Mao was still shuffling from palace to palace, Jiang Qing’s Four Model Revolutionary Opera...

I don’t know any more what exactly motivated my friend and me several years ago to visit the American Museum of Natural History at Central Park West and 79th Street, a place favored primarily by dating lovers and families with children. It was one of our several forays into NYC’s tourist zones of attraction, quite inappropriate for us, as we were permanent inhabitants of the metropolis and its region. Most likely, we were procrastinating vis-à...

As far back as I can remember, I have dreamt about being inside a modernist painting. Akira Kurosawa’s film Dreams (!), whose protagonist walks inside Van Gogh’s paintings, suggests that I might be not alone with this type of obsession. However, my dream has always been about modernist deconstructions of the city. Whenever I looked at Ludwig Kirchner’s slanted Berlin streets, Lyonel Feininger’s hovering tenement buildings, or Giorgio de Chiric...

Everyone who comes to New Haven should stop at least once at the Duncan Hotel on Chapel Street. It is one of the city’s oldest curiosities and landmarks-- along with York Pizza with its old photographic displays of the juvenile sportive herds of would-be presidents in tight football pants (some of them signed by real presidents) and the used record store Cutler’s with its unique, first-hand photographs from the Black Panther trial era. All the...

Or: What I did on my printculture vacation. I spent my printculture vacation moving from Seoul to Shanghai. Moving on a tight budget requires a paring down process — we ended up giving or throwing away a good portion of our belongings and all of our furniture and were still left with about a ton of stuff to transport to our new home. But the logistics of transporting stuff turned out to be a lot less complicated and interesting than the ...

For a few years now we’ve had this bedtime ritual: we take turns saying five things we’re thankful for. As I sat down to write this I couldn’t remember why we began the practice; but looking back at my old blogs I see that it was a response to W’s increasing desire for the things (and brands) his friends had. I wanted to take some time each day to acknowledge and appreciate what we already had. His first list (made while in the bathroom brushi...

Well, once again, someone outside my head has gotten around to saying in print what I've been saying aloud for years: the whole tendency to joke about prison rape in the United States is incredibly depressing, and, if you'll permit it, an expression of genuine evil. ----- The photo, by the way, is from Abu Ghraib, and the connections should be clear enough. Like those prisoners, the ones released from US prisons head out into society damaged p...

I didn’t expect to like the Musée du Quai Branly, otherwise known as the Museum of First (or Primal) Arts, when it opened last year. Finally, having visited it, I can verify my prediction. My main feeling is one of puzzlement: why did they do it at all? Wasn’t there anyone to give them advice?

My friend Paul Freedman spent several years in Nashville, just after I left Nashville and began wandering the highways and hedgerows. Paul is not just a renowned medievalist but a guy who knows his way around the kitchen, combining these interests lately by writing on surviving medieval cookery books (Hmm, said the gnat, you might make a joke about that gerund…)—it turns out they’re not entirely about rotting meat dredged in spices, but make a...

I went into the city the other day — you wouldn’t believe how disgusting it was. Every office, every bar, there was a clump of people standing outside smoking and no room to go around them. On such a gray day you could hardly tell if you were inside or out. Throw in packs of taxis and all the delivery trucks and it felt like there was twice as much carbon as oxygen.

We’re deep into the process of buying our first home, an endeavor complicated by the fact that we’re doing the transactions from out of state. We had given ourselves five days to look at properties and make a decision—foolhardy, perhaps, but we reasoned that we’d have to find a place to live anyway, so why not get a pre-approval and go take a look at what’s available. But this post isn’t about the incredibly stressful process of buying the mo...

My oldest child W began elementary school in March (the school year begins in March in Korea). For months before this moms with older children had been telling me (with a maniacal gleam of the eye), “Oh you’re going to be really BUSY from now on.” As anyone even tangentially integrated into the Ajuma* network of Seoul knows, education is a big deal and a huge source of pressure here. We had always planned to send our kids to local school; we w...

A few years ago E Wesp and I published an essay in Postmodern Culture that attempted to think through the sociocultural structure of the online virtual world of Norrath, best known for being the home of EverQuest. One of the things we were very interested in at the time was the way in which the gameworld organized relationships among players, about which we made two major points:

I didn't have a camera with me (to be honest I don't own a camera) so I won't be able to replicate the photojournalism of Riis. Instead I'm offering some stolen images as companions to my observations of Providence, Rhode Island, from where I have just returned. My purpose in visiting was primarily pleasure, not business, so my comments on Brown as an Ivy League institution are limited. But I did party with some grad students and poke my way t...

Some call it the TGB, or Très Grande Bibliothèque; some call it the Pharaoh’s Tomb. In an area of unrelieved straight lines, plate glass and railway yards, four huge towers of glass in the shape of half-opened books rise, surrounding a wooden deck that surrounds a sunken garden containing grass and tall pines.

I'm just back from California and here's what I saw.

Or: “What traveling means to me” I have returned home from my trip and am unpacking. Home’s familiar textures and smells are comforting and reassuring if a little dull. After three weeks of imposing on people with more real estate our apartment feels smaller than I remember but my hands, with memory of their own, can still find the light switches in the dark. Each trip is an emotional journey, beginning with excitement, anticipatio...

As often happens, this year there is a solitary day between the onslaught of end-of-term grading and the holiday trip to visit family. With a long drive ahead, We have our sights set on the wee hours of tomorrow morning as our time of departure, our hopes pinned on the idea that by the time we're fully awake, we'll be somewhere in New York.

I was at the mall recently, buying socks for myself and thinking about what to buy for my co-workers for Christmas. I'm in denial about getting presents for my family. In one department store, I overheard a woman saying to her friend in a NY/NJ accent, “nothing in this store is saying 'buy me.'” So, I didn't come home totally empty-handed. Anyway, if the holiday pressures are getting you down, as they are me, here's an option: make...

About a month ago I rented Jonathan Nossiter’s 2004 documentary Mondovino, an often light-hearted but ultimately earnest look at the state of the international wine industry. Nossiter gets at the big issues not through a top-down survey of import and export figures, growing trends, and the like, but through individual and sometimes even intimate encounters with major growers, critics, and connoisseurs.

I spend about ten months of the year thirty miles south of the DMZ, and the rest of the time, for the sake of my children’s English, my own sanity, and my need to fulfill all my repressed dietary cravings (reuben sandwiches, burritos, raspberries) I pack the bags, bribe the kids, and board the plane to return to the suburbs of the U.S. where I grew up. Among other transformations, I’ve noticed this one: as I go about my day-to-day mommy tasks ...