"I'm an alien (but my parents are Indian.)" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Tina Malhotra’s journey through a high school existential crisis was difficult. Bringing her world to life was just as wrenching.
Read more on Tina’s Mouth: A Graphic Novel That Gives Indian-American Stereotypes the Finger…
The offices of L.A. Voice, where Umar Hakim is in residency, are on the third floor of the First Baptist Church of Los Angeles. So when it comes time for Hakim to offer his daily prayers, he finds a quiet room, faces Mecca and turns his thoughts to God.
For my first attempt at storytelling with this new social media tool, I recapped a panel at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas. Feedback would be great — should I write more, include more tweets, include fewer tweets? Is this actually good for a reader who wasn’t at the event?
Read more on My first Storify from SXSW Interactive…
Yesterday was Fred Korematsu Day in California.
Korematsu, a Japanese-American who resisted placement in a World War II-era internment camp, and later fought in courts to have a Supreme Court conviction of “defiance” overturned, was remembered on January 30 in the state of California. In September, California declared this day, Korematsu’s birthday, to be the Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution.
I wrote about the day and what it means for Asian American civil rights advocates for Mother Jones online and about bloggers’ initial reactions for GlobalVoices.
Not a reader? Here’s the trailer for 2007 documentary Of Civil Wrongs and Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story.
Of Civil Wrongs and Rights – trailer from Asian Law Caucus on Vimeo.
Read more on Fred Korematsu Day, Two Ways…
Reading about Wikileaks’ release of American diplomatic cables makes me think about our vocabulary around foreign policy. How do we talk about foreign policy and who exactly should have access to information that U.S. representatives abroad collect? This summer, Peter Beinart told me that the public rarely drives foreign policy. In The Icarus Syndrome he called for Americans to engage and push back against abuse of power. He recently wrote in The Daily Beast that Wikileaks’ actions are little more than voyeuristic fodder and add little to public debate, but my conversation with him makes me wonder if the Wikileaks project could, at least, be a springboard for greater conversation about American foreign policy.
I wrote a review of The Icarus Syndrome and short Q&A with Beinart for the Abu Dhabi-based Afaq Al Mustaqbal Magazine, which translated the piece into Arabic and edited for length. It ran in Issue No. 7, Sept/Oct 2010 (PDF with Arabic text). Below is the text as I submitted it.
Temptations of Power
The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris
By Peter Beinart
By Angilee Shah
If the power of Fox News is a conundrum to Americans on the political left now, what Peter Beinart chronicles in the history of American politics shows that it is not a new dilemma. The tendency of the political elite to push ideologies to its extremes is cyclical and disastrous, or so goes the lessons of The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris.
Beinart’s last book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals–and Only Liberals–Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, chronicled the history of liberals’ foreign policies and called for liberals in 2006 to take a strong position in the war on terror while remembering that power is not always a force for good. The Icarus Syndrome takes a broader view on the same theme. Writing across political parties, Beinart retells stories of political power at the outsets of World War I, Vietnam and Iraq, and sections them into ideological cycles, to remind us that power and success should not make us disregard the limits of our ideologies. Read more on Temptations of Power…
This might have been a better post last week, when I had a nice dozen posts for my new blog at ReportingonHealth, but it’s still a good time to take stock.
Every week since June, I have been writing about career issues that health journalists — and many other types of journalists — face in Career GPS. It’s a bit of a narcissistic task, in a way, because I answer questions that I am interested in for my own career. But in meeting the community on ReportingonHealth, I’ve learned that a lot of journalists have these types of questions too. From getting health insurance to becoming a better writer, here’s a quick sum up of the 13 posts I’ve written so far.
If you like this sort of thing and want to keep up with Career GPS, you can follow the blog’s RSS feed. If you are interested in health journalism, you can follow the site’s full RSS feed or subscribe to the weekly newsletter. Read more on 13 posts about careers in journalism…
It’s 9/11 in America. I feel like every year for the past nine years, we’ve been questioning our identity, our values in this country. I wanted to remind myself that this is not a country of people like Terry Jones. Rather, this is a country where people like Terry Jones might end up all over the news, but also where Lee Ielpi, Henry Rollins, Amman Ali and Bassam Tariq can carve out their say. So here are a collection of things I saw and heard that gave me a broader view. Read more on Things that aren’t about Pastor Jones…
Southern California friends, I’d love to see you at this event. If the chance to hear from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson doesn’t convince you, maybe this cool poster from Maritess Santiago at the UCI Humanities Collective will:
Read more on Where will you be on June 7?…
