The LAT's Edmund Sanders profiles Awatif Ahmed Isshag, the 24 year old who represents local journalism in Darfur:
EL FASHER, SUDA--For Awatif Ahmed Isshag, covering Darfur is the story of her life.
Nearly a decade ago, at 14, Isshag started publishing a handwritten community newsletter about local events, arts and religion. Once a month she'd paste decorated pages to a large piece of wood and hang it from a tree outside her family's home for passersby to read.
But after western Sudan plunged into bloodshed and suffering in 2003, Isshag's publication took on a decidedly sharper edge, tackling issues such as the plight of refugees, water shortages, government inaction in the face of militia attacks, and sexual violence against women.
Her grass-roots periodical has become the closest thing that El Fasher, capital of North Darfur state, has to a hometown newspaper. More than 100 people a day stop to check out her latest installments, some walking several miles from nearby displacement camps, she said....
"She represents the only indigenous piece of journalism in Darfur," said Simon Haselock, a media consultant with Africa Union in Khartoum. "She's got energy and drive. It's exactly what they need."
Readers say her magazine, called Al Raheel (which roughly translates as "Moving" or "Departing"), is one of the only places they can read locally produced stories about issues touching their lives.
"It's the best because this magazine shows what is really happening in Darfur," said Mohammed Ameen Slik, 30, an airline supervisor who lives nearby.
Isshag complained that despite international attention, the suffering of Darfur remained vastly underreported inside Sudan. There are no television stations in the area, and most newspapers operate under government control or are based hundreds of miles away in Khartoum.
"The local media don't cover the issue of Darfur," she said. "We hear about it when one child dies in Iraq, but we hear nothing when 50 children die" in Darfur.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 04, 2007 • Comments
The LAT's Steffie Nelson profiles Vanessa Gonzalez, who creates and coordinates events for the Museum of Contemporary Art:
As MOCA's development events manager, coordinating an average of 35 events a year, Gonzalez is more rock 'n' roll chick than art geek, with her platinum hair, platform shoes, high-gloss lips and vanity plates that say "GR*UPIE." Over the past five years, she's produced events that have made MOCA one of the hottest social tickets in town, like this past fall's "Skin + Bones" fete, which attracted such A-listers as Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. With the growing L.A. art scene, the museum's membership has also shot up, which, according to MOCA's director, Jeremy Strick, can be linked in part to "the unique atmosphere Vanessa helps to create."...
A first-generation Mexican American who was raised in Monterey Park, Gonzalez, 31, found her special events calling early, directing her cousins in plays and turning the family abode into a haunted house for Halloween — "with soundtracks that I created the day before, and all-out lighting effects." Costumes too, of course. "Absolutely! I would raid my mother's closet, and of course I had no idea when I was 7 who Karl Lagerfeld was, but I was wearing it!"
After finishing her theater degree at Cal State Fullerton, Gonzalez moved to London with four suitcases--one containing just shoes--to immerse herself in the Brit pop scene. She helped launch Ian Schrager's first international boutique hotel, St. Martin's Lane, returning home after she'd pushed her visa to the limit. Through the newspaper she found a job in MOCA's visitor services department, and two years later she began producing donor and fundraising events.
This is the kind of job that no one ever imagined as a serious career 20 years ago--and that people still don't think of when they ask, "Where will new jobs come from?" The new sources of jobs are much more fragmented than the old, and more and more of them involve creating experiences rather than stuff. These event-planning jobs are increasingly common, as organizations realize that what people will pay for these days is in-person attention. I seem to get at least two internal emails a week advertising events-related jobs at Atlantic Media.
For insights into the underlying dynamics, see Fred Turner's 1996 Reason article on the "charm economy," and Neal Stephenson's brilliant, hard-to-find, and probably illegally posted story, "Jipi's Bad Day," originally published in the 80th-anniversary issue of Forbes in 1997. (I still have the issue, though it's 1,245 miles away at the moment so I can't check the story's title.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 04, 2007 • Comments
In fact, I've been known to say in public that he's "the devil." But Joe Conason has a point, especially about the always-inconsistent Maureen Dowd. (I had to laugh at her I-am-so-erudite column sneering at chick lit, the genre whose values she has done so much to bring to the op-ed page.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 04, 2007 • Comments
Grace Peng, who is probably the greenest person I know in her personal behavior, explains why even she is against the light bulb ban. It's amazing how legislators and regulators are determined to reward and punish particular technologies rather than letting price signals work.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 03, 2007 • Comments
In our Bloggingheads conversation, Dan Drezner and I discussed the younger generation's proclivities for self-disclosure, following up on this post. Perhaps, I suggest, putting your life online is just a phase and people will pull back once they realize there are negative consequences, assuming such consequences are, in fact, forthcoming. This ABC report suggests that's exactly what's happening--to the point that one guy has even made a business of hunting down and removing embarrassing material. He has some advice:
Fertik suggests 20-somethings give posting personal information on the Web the same consideration they would a major body modification.
"The best way to think of this is as a tattoo," he said. "Would your 30-year-old self want to live with the decisions of your 20-year-old self? Would your 40-year-old self want to live with those decisions?"
In today's WSJ, however, Jennifer Saranow suggests that the cult of too much information is infiltrating the adult world (free link):
If you hate newsy holiday letters, brace yourself for the live blog.
People are increasingly documenting the most mundane and private aspects of their lives and posting them the instant they happen. From birth -- "I can see his head a little" -- to death -- "so many memories," one blogger posted from a funeral -- no experience is too personal or sacred not to be shared....
Hosts who want to ensure that guests focus on the festivities are responding with countermeasures. Expecting about half a dozen bloggers at their wedding, Joey de Villa, 39, and Wendy Koslow, 32, posted "A Note To Other Bloggers" on their wedding Web site about two weeks before their September 2005 nuptials in Cambridge, Mass. The note asked guests not to bring their laptops to the event and to only blog about the wedding after the fact. "I wanted them to pay attention and enjoy themselves and participate," says Ms. Koslow, who came up with the idea for the embargo. "I wanted them to be in the moment."
Although the guests complied, the first attendee blog post was up by 11:16 that night, shortly after the reception ended. The culprit: Rev. A. K. M. Adam, a 49-year-old Episcopal priest from Evanston, Ill., who preached at the ceremony. From his hotel room, he wrote, "the ketubah is signed, the glass smashed, the champagne toasted, the disco medley played, and the guests exhausted. These guests, anyway." Rev. Adam says, "It was the thing that happened that day, so I wrote about it."
He didn't explain why an Episcopal priest was overseeing a ketubah or what happened to the "the" before Reverend. (Back in my day, the WSJ was more careful about such things. But then you couldn't use "Ms." either. I am so old...)
UPDATE: Speaking of youthful indiscretions, here's the scoop on Hillary Diane Rodham's formerly locked up senior thesis about Saul Alinsky. The Clintons really were stupid to persuade Wellesley to make it off-limits, feeding speculation that it would prove her a youthful communist.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 02, 2007 • Comments
Drawing on numbers collected by Max Boot, Michael Barone explains why Angelina Jolie's plea for someone to do something for Darfur misses a practical point. It's easy to pick on an actress. Alas, the same critique applies to sophisticated observers like Nicholas Kristof. It's hard--perhaps impossible--to stop genocide without a lot of troops.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 02, 2007 • Comments
After a false start on Monday--bizarre visual effects here, explanation here--Dan Drezner and I recorded a Bloggingheads.tv conversation yesterday, with topics ranging from the Oscars and Oscar fashion to privacy and the confessional practices of Dan's deadbeat students. You can view it here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on February 28, 2007 • Comments
Reader Jim Mamer writes:
One of the side benefits of all this "spying" showed up in the news in the West Palm Beach, Florida, area last week. Kids in high and middle schools are using their cell phone cameras to photograph and put on the net pictures of students doing drugs on campus. My daughter complained about the druggies when she was at Dwyer HS about eight years ago (students shooting up heroin in the girls bathrooms...and Dwyer has a mostly white, middle and upper middle class student body), but school officials wouldn't do anything. I haven't heard much since then, but the media tend to ignore or suppress bad news about the schools.
Sounds like fodder for an episode in the Law and Order franchise.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on February 26, 2007 • Comments
The LAT's Marc Lifsher and Adrian G. Uribarri report on prospects for a ban on incandescent bulbs. It's a solid piece, but substantive objections to the idea are buried at the end.
Philips still would like to tweak the California bill so that new types of higher-efficiency incandescent halogen bulbs could be sold after 2012.
A Philips halogen bulb that uses 50% less electricity, he said, will be available this year.
Levine, the legislator, says he's open to looking at new technologies if they become commercially viable.
In the meantime, California shouldn't try to mandate compact fluorescent bulbs for every household use, said Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California Energy Institute in Berkeley.
Borenstein burns both types of bulbs at his home in the Bay Area community of Orinda but has discovered that fluorescents don't work as well as incandescent bulbs with recessed lighting fixtures, spotlights and ultra-low dimming switches.
"There are a lot of places we really should be using compact fluorescents more," he said. "But there are a lot of situations where incandescent still makes a lot of sense."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on February 25, 2007 • Comments
Amitai Etzioni, whose public persona is unmatched in its combination of self-righteousness and self-promotion, writes to the NYTBR to take issue with my review of Kieran Healy's Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs
:
Virginia Postrel, a renowned libertarian, draws on "Last Best Gifts," by an economic sociologist, Kieran Healy (Jan. 28), to argue that the altruistic "ideology" of giving the gift of life stands in the way of developing a market in organs.
Actually, what we need is more, not fewer, evocations of our moral responsibilities....
...if the market steps in, we know from experience in other nations that the rich would purchase the organs and the poor would risk their health by selling theirs. One can be a market zealot and still argue for keeping the money-changers out of this temple.
While I appreciate being referred to as "renowned" (if only), Etzioni's letter beautifully illustrates Healy's point: that the debate over organs (and blood, which I didn't have room to discuss) unnecessarily and inaccurately posits a sharp split between market exchange and social and cultural commitments. Although Etzioni wants to box me in as a "market zealot," that's an absurdly--and deliberately--reductionist view of my thought on this issue and many others. The letter also demonstrates that Etzioni is not a particularly careful reader or at least isn't interested in the hard empirical facts of the kidney crisis. Rising to the bait, I sent him the following email:
Dear Amitai,
Thanks for calling me renowned. We can only wish...
Alas, while your proposal might help the relatively short waiting list for hearts, it wouldn't do much for the 60,000-plus Americans waiting for kidneys. The numbers simply don't add up. Only living donors can make up the difference. I've contributed a kidney. How about you?
Virginia
That last line is pretty snarky, especially since I'm well aware that Etzioni is too old to be an organ donor. But, like many other people, he treats kidney donation as an inconceivable risk to one's health and the idea of taking money for it as therefore inherently exploitative. Hence it's worth pointing out that I'm not advocating paying people for something I wasn't willing to do for free.
His response is telling, since it contradicts his anti-market propaganda in the Times.
dear viriginia
I wish my organs would be useable. I salute your donation which I am sure was made out of moral motives and not a transaction. I am not against a "market" as long as we first do as much as we can with donations, as we do with blood.
best amitai
So why, other than self-promotion, did he bother spilling ink in the Timees and defaming the idea of any incentives for organs? I suspect that the question answers itself.
On a more positive note, it looks like House will vote on Tuesday to pass the Living Organ Kidney Donation Clarification Act, which I blogged about here. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Jay Inslee and the late Rep. Charlie Norwood, will make it clear that "paired donations" are legal. Let's hope the Senate follows suit right away.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on February 25, 2007 • Comments