It was the briefest of observations, an exchange that lasted no more than two seconds, and yet it has stayed with me ever since. CB and I were on Boston’s Silver Line, on our way to the airport, and eventually to New York City. It was, apparently, a popular day for travel and the seats [...]

Over at 80+1 I just published my interview with Gabriela Golder of the Arrorró project to document and analyze as many lullabies from around the world as possible. Head on over and you can watch both Georgia and me singing lullabies. Here’s a teaser: I sat down with Golder at El Hipopotamo in the San [...]

I am subscribed to about 2,000 RSS feeds and on the rare days that I’m able to read through even a fourth of them I always feel that every thought that could be said already has been said, and probably a million times over. And so, weighed down by so much information, I put on [...]

Despite my love of the tropics, I’ve come to appreciate some of the wonders that come with distancing oneself from the equator. Seasons, for example, and their undeniable sway over a city’s mood. In the weeks leading up to my departure from the United States several heat waves spread over both left and right coasts. [...]

OK, I think I’m finally ready to announce the big news that, along with Chinese über-blogger Isaac Mao, I will be co-curating this year’s Ars Electronica Symposium on September 5th in Linz, Austria. I’m honored to be in the company of past curators including Joi Ito who organized last year’s New Cultural Economy Symposium and [...]

On the one hand, the very nature of a citizen media project like Global Voices enables every single participant to contribute ideas to improve the project. All they have to do – as Bolivian volunteer translator Miguel Esquirol did earlier this week – is publish their ideas on a blog. On the other hand, it [...]

A couple months ago a French photographer and street artist who goes by JR gained a good deal of attention for his latest installation in Kibera, one of the world’s largest slums (population 1 million), located on the outskirts of Nairobi in Kenya. His work was featured in Juxtapoz, Utne Reader, Wooster Collective, and on [...]

From Ta-Nehisi: Our problem is this–we have pundits who are geniuses at interpreting numbers, but rank failures at interpreting people. This is how someone looks at you with a straight face and argues that black men will use gay marriage to escape the altar. It’s a notion cultivated by a pundit who’s stared at the [...]

At around 30,000 feet somewhere between San Francisco and Boston I was holding back tears. Okuribito is one of the most beautiful, haunting movies I’ve ever seen. Don’t ask me where I heard about it. Might have been Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, or just ESP. But somewhere, at some point, my buddy Georgia made the recommendation [...]

No matter how ill-kept, no matter how neglected or hemmed in they are by concrete monstrosities, the great mosques and other monuments of the city, as well as the lesser detritus of empire in every side street and corner – the little arches, fountains, and neighborhood mosques – inflict heartache on all who live among [...]