THERE’S NO USE in a writer denying the pleasures derived of notoriety, but it happened this week that I was “Freshly Pressed” and that I had feelings about it which weren’t entirely comforting. In case you don’t know, to be Freshly Pressed (or FPd, as I have discovered the WordPress folks put it) is to have a post chosen by the editors of WordPress for the landing page at wordpress.com. This arbitrary distinction — as I feel it to be — brings with it a huge momentary increase in traffic, comments, email and polite approbation. In short, here comes and goes your fifteen minutes of fame.
Monthly Archives: October 2012
The Courage of Malala Yousafzai and the Lessons of Mingora
THERE ARE no words of sufficient force to summarize this week’s attempted murder of fourteen year-old Malala Yousafzai, in the northwest Pakistan city of Mingora. Yet as shocking as this savagery is, there is nothing new about it either: depravity is the business of the Taliban franchise. There are however some lessons to be drawn from the years during which the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (abbreviated as TTP and known also as the Pakistani Taliban) terrorized the Swat valley and Mingora specifically.
Podcast 14: Eric J. Hobsbawm, Rob Anders, Ai Weiwei, Frozen Dead Guy, Mini Dinosaurs, and more
Looking Back at the Mau Mau Uprising
THE KENYA MAU MAU uprising, whose 60th anniversary arrives on October 7, has a legacy which reaches into some surprising places. Recall for instance Mike Huckabee’s comment of late February 2011, on The Steve Malzberg Show:
“If you think about it, [President Obama’s] perspective as growing up in Kenya, with a Kenyan father and grandfather — their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”
Canada Takes a Bold Step by Adding Indian Residential Schools to the Curricula
THIS WEEK the governments of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories launched a “first of its kind” curriculum, the focus of which is Canada’s discredited Indian Residential School System. The Honourable Jackson Lafferty, Deputy Premier of the Northwest Territories, and the Honourable Eva Aariak, Premier of Nunavut, attended a Yellowknife ceremony to mark Canada’s formal commencement of a project urged sixteen years ago by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) and urged again in more recent years by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, or TRC.
Stephen Harper has good reason to be skeptical of the United Nations
RISING BY NECESSITY from the ash of its discredited predecessor, the United Nations on the 24th of January 1946 adopted its first resolution — a call for the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, particularly of the atomic kind, and thereby for the exclusive, peaceful use of atomic energy.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 