Since my dear friend, Cindylu, just published a post titled “On Beauty”, I figure I might as well dig through my unpublished drafts and publish one with nearly the same title. I wrote this about a year and a half ago over a steaming glass of chai in Delhi, India. I’m looking forward to reading [...]

First of all, let me emphasize that the super gringo accent is not mine. That belongs to none other than Mr. Steven Mansour. My yankee voice only makes the occasional brief cameo after the 5 minute mark.
Steve did a great job producing the video, which documents the successes of the Kangaroo Program (New York Times [...]

It was the half hour sliver of clock that is neither day nor darkness. But nobody realized. Not the prostitutes nor the cocktail waitresses nor my taxi driver, cheerfully escorting one more stranger back to the airport, back to where he came from.
“Where do you come from?” he asks.
There are two types of latin accents [...]

This will have to be an English-only post until I get the video of Nicholas up on dotSUB and add Spanish subtitles. I’m currently at the Calabash International Literary Festival with Georgia, Nicholas, Annie, Kei, Peter, Jonathan, JJ, and company.
Here’s a video interview I recorded with Nicholas Laughlin, editor of the Caribbean Review of Books, [...]

Every two weeks we feature four to five posts by Rising Voices participants as a way of showcasing some of the finest content from new voices that are typically ignored by both traditional and new media.
In order to make new voices heard, however, we must be willing to hear them. Please take twenty minutes [...]

The blue of the Las Vegas sky and the force of its sun never change throughout the day. It could be 8 a.m. or 6 p.m. Either way it’s bright and hot as hell. The lego-like horizon of the strip stares over the rest of the city in a stupor of superiority, full of its [...]

Because it is interesting news in itself, and because I know that my friends Chris and Hanako are interested in blog posts about Japan in the non-Western world, here is my translation of a brief blog post by Mariano Amartino about the increasing profits by record labels in Japan.
The latest study by the Record Industry [...]

I’m in Houston International Airport, one of my least favorites, waiting for my delayed flight to Las Vegas, probably my least favorite city in the entire world. I left Buenos Aires filled with sweet sadness. There is so much that I’ll miss. Here in Houston, having arrived far too early in the morning and getting [...]

Originally published on Idea Lab.

An avalanche of analysis, impassioned commentary, and angry rants descended upon the tech mediapshere over the two past weeks ever since One Laptop Per Child Chairman Nicholas Negroponte urged developers for the XO laptop (formerly the ‘$100 laptop’) to recreate the student computer’s user interface for Windows XP rather than Linux. [...]

Sometimes I feel like there are more websites dedicated to documenting citizen journalism than actual citizen journalism initiatives. Among them: J-Lab, Idea Lab, Media Shift, Press Think, MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, Contentious, Online Journalism Review, Social Media, NewAssignment.Net, and a slew of personal blogs (like this one) that are often focused on that [...]