i6huge239w A New York University alumni friend of mine told me about a controversy brewing at his alma mater. It stems from a larger controversy, far away on the small island nation of Singapore. Dr. Thio Li-Ann, law professor at the National University of Singapore, has been appointed as a visiting scholar on human rights to NYU’s law school beginning this fall. But Thio’s track-record on human rights is in question.
Posts in the United States category:
looking back, looking forward
It’s the closing night at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific American Film Festival and one film — not a new film — really caught my eye this year. On Saturday, the festival showed the 1987 documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? The documentary is a powerful staple of Asian American history which I had never gotten […]
Global Lives #2: Anil Kapoor
Anil Kapoor told me I have a “lovely smile.” My mother was pretty excited. And that says a lot. This 30-year Bollywood veteran is now the kind of star in America who draws attention on a red carpet in Hollywood. Kapoor made his international debut as the dubious host of India’s version of Who Wants to Be a […]
free culture on 35mm
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: I hereby give Sita […]
Clinton on Pakistan
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 […]
This Week: Follow-ups to terrorist attacks in India and the earthquake in China, perspectives on Iraq and North Korea
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. First, two […]
the China bloggers post
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: All good things come to an end, and that is true today for myself and China Rises. This […]
Global Lives #1: Project Kashmir
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 […]
Bobby Jindal’s wife and John McCain’s daughter
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 […]
some recent Sri Lanka reports
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 […]