I had the good fortune last night to see Sita Sings the Blues on honest-to-goodness film at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles. I had heard about the movie a while ago; director Nina Paley offered her seven-year project up for free in many forms on the Internet. She writes:
Read more on free culture on 35mm…
A quick post — I was really surprised to hear Secretary of State Hillary Clinton being very forthright about America’s errors in Pakistan and Afghanistan. “Let’s remember here,” she told a congressional hearing, “the people we are fighting today, we funded 20 years ago.” She links the problems in the region now, in part, to America’s policies in fighting the Soviet Union. “Let’s be careful what we sow, because we will harvest,” she said. Here’s the clip from CNN:
Read more on Clinton on Pakistan…
I’m starting a weekly post that rehashes some of the most interesting and unusual reports on Asia (in English) and the world. Let me know what you think, and if you find this kind of feature useful. For more interesting things on the web, from newspapers and blogs, see my shared stories page.
I’ve been a loyal reader of Tim Johnson’s McClatchy Newspapers blog, China Rises, since it started three years ago. It’s only today that I thought about it, though, because Johnson is leaving the blog behind. He writes:
Read more on the China bloggers post…
I did a story about the documentary film Project Kashmir for Asia Pacific Arts. You can see the story and all of APA’s coverage of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival in their website. I also made my first attempt at making a podcast start-to-finish. I hope these will become more engaging as I keep practicing.
Read more on Global Lives #1: Project Kashmir…
The Daily Beast published an interview — a bit of a back scratching set of questions and answers, really — that Meghan McCain did with First Lady of Lousiana Supriya Jindal. I read it and recalled Governor Bobby Jindal’s interview on 60 Minutes. It rubbed me the wrong way for a lot of reasons. I don’t doubt that Bobby Jindal is extremely intelligent and sincere in his love for America. His resume is really impressive. It doesn’t bother me that he changed his name from Piyush to Bobby and converted from Hinduism to Christianity. A lot of these things that many Indian Americans look askance at when they talk at the kitchen table don’t concern me much.
Read more on Bobby Jindal’s wife and John McCain’s daughter…
When the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) published a report a co-author and I did on the conflict in Sri Lanka, I did not get much of a response. But when they put that report online, the emails and comments began. If new journalism is meant to create community conversation, I hope that this article has done new journalism proud.
Read more on some recent Sri Lanka reports…
I’ve been working on a story about religion in this country and I came across a really excellent example of how multimedia can be used well. This is just a short post to share it.
Read more on USA Today, dealing with numbers, and religion in America…
I started reading the introduction to The Elements of Journalism, published in June, 2006. I stopped at this paragraph:
When the flow of news is obstructed, “a darkness falls,” and anxiety grows. The world, in effect, becomes too quiet. We feel alone. John McCain, the U.S. senator from Arizona, writes that in his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, what he missed most was not comfort, food, freedom, or even his family and friends. “The thing I missed most was information — free uncensored, undistorted, abundant information.”
And it occurred to me that, though I was no prisoner, I shared this feeling when I was living in Singapore. I had comforts and avenues for learning, but I missed the vibrant news cultures of Bangkok and Mumbai and even Los Angeles. Lo and behold, a few paragraphs down, the authors, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, write this:
Read more on my online journalism life…
Next week, I’m attending a talk in Culver City. It’s one of my favorite parts of the greater Los Angeles sprawl, a no-fuss but energetic neighborhood with approachable people and good food. It represents comfort in a big city. But the talk, hosted by Zocalo Public Square, is about what is perhaps the antithesis of neighborly comforts. It asks the provocative question “Is the Internet Making Us Mean?”
