I’m blown away by the pace of journalism these days – but also, more importantly, the quality. In Mexico I used to surf a lot of news sites to try to get a grasp of what was going on in the country: El Universal, La Jornada, Milenio, Proceso, Nexos, The News and several others. But [...]

In a recent post, “Indigenous Protests, Wikileaks and Online Subtitles” I focused on the social and historical importance of adding subtitles to online video, especially as it relates to those who promote human rights and inclusive rural development. Most of the post is centered around a single video of an indigenous woman delivering a powerful [...]

In June 2009 residents of Lima witnessed just how far removed their urban media were from the reality of daily life in the north of Peru. Peruvian protesters in June 2009 at Devil’s Curve. Photograph by Enrique Castro-Mendivil. The Protest Earlier that year Peru signed a free trade agreement with the United States that opened [...]

The following is my translation of Alberto Escorcia’s post, “Ley General de Población, una SB-1070 a la mexicana“, which was originally published on Pateando Piedras under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share alike license. Photographs are by Don Bartletti of the Los Angeles Times, a photojournalist I’ve long admired. Mexico’s “General Population Act” is similar to, or [...]

I keep thinking back to this idea that rather than readers paying for publications, writers will eventually have to pay readers for their attention. Many – maybe most – of my friends consider themselves writers of some type. They hang onto different labels – novelist, short story writer, journalist, columnist, researcher, poet – but, in [...]

The following is my translation of Paula Gonzalo’s interview with Juan Arellano about the Lingua Project on Global Voices. Links have been changed to their English-language equivalents when possible. Juan Arellano is one of the bloggers who, beginning in 2007, has been working as an editor for the Global Voices Lingua project, one of the [...]

On September 19, 2005 a tall, dark, and handsome Taiwanese blogger who goes by the strange name of “Portnoy” decided that he would start translating select blog posts from Global Voices into Chinese. His first translation was of a post by Indonesian blogger Enda Nasution which summed up the week’s news from Indonesia through the [...]

In The Omnivore’s Dilema Michael Pollan reminds us that food is an inelastic good, which is to say that, obesity aside, there is a limit to how many calories a person can consume in a single day. Any more and we would explode. Once we all reach that caloric daily limit then the food industry [...]

I intended for this post to serve as some sort of table of contents for what I’ll be writing about over the next couple months, but I think that this is really me trying to keep my head on straight as I flutter and flounder all over the map. The Soul of the New Machine: [...]

Itzpapalotl continues to be one of my favorite bloggers. I love her life vignettes. Today’s sorta took the words right out of my brain-fluff: A nosotros la tierra nos expulsa, cada ciudad es como un trampolín desbalanceado. Vivimos al portal de la semana próxima, con amigos tenues y lugares hermosos, bañados de la luz benéfica [...]