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Maybe everyone else already knows this, but I was stunned to learn that an utterly pedestrian detail -- the reliability of translation services -- has hurt America's efforts to negotiate an end to the turmoil over North Korea's nuclear weapons. According to a report released this month by the ...
My own presumptions about Pakistan did not prepare me for the sight of this, this, this, or any of Kate Brooks' other photos from Karachi's "fashion week" -- a glitzy event that, in the words of its organizer, can be seen as a "gesture of defiance to the Taliban." This blog, as I've explained, is ...
Knowing full well that I tee myself up for easy, Whitney-Houston-themed ridicule, I'm here to say that the children are our future, and that childhood in the Gaza Strip -- a radicalized, blinkered, deprived existence, according to Lawrence Wright's humane report for The New Yorker -- bodes very ...
Because government troops in Guinea massacred civilian protesters at about the same time as I started blogging for Big Think, I've committed myself to using this space to track events in that all-too-easily-forgotten piece of west Africa. A November 5 BBC radio report warns that the trauma of the ...
One word haunts Seymour Hersh's new investigative piece about the potentially shaky security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal: "mutiny." As Hersh writes, "the Taliban overrunning Islamabad is not the only, or even the greatest, concern. The principal fear is mutiny—that extremists inside the Pakistani ...
Like any mere bystander, I'm always at risk of getting etherized by the abstractions of war. So there was something compelling and arresting about hearing writer Mark Danner detail the junk-shop pragmatism that goes into making a roadside bomb and waging so-called "asymmetric warfare." Danner ...
Because we aspire to put ideas above ideology here at Big Think, I want to make sure you've heard of Andrew Bacevich, a scholar and retired army officer who would disagree mightily with my recent assertion that "America helps itself in warfare by relying on face-to-face counterinsurgency." Last ...
Why Vietnam Matters -- a book recommended recently by George Packer of The New Yorker -- gets interesting before you come across a single word written by the book's author. Richard Holbrooke, the president's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, wrote a foreword for the book which might hold ...
When I muse about the sort of Americans who might one day write in to share first-hand insights on this Global Pedestrian blog of mine, I tend to think of Peace Corps volunteers or backpackers with Eurail passes or even members of the U.S. military. A group I didn't consider, until reading the ...
If you think "Sony" or "Toyota" when you think of Japan, you might just be as clueless as I've been about "the nation’s postwar order, which relied on colossal public works spending," according to the New York Times . I missed the Times story when it ran last month. I only found it because twice ...
"Obama's War," the smart Frontline episode about Afghanistan and Pakistan, includes a disquieting exchange between a U.S. Marine and two tribal elders in a remote Afghan village. Since this Global Pedestrian blog aspires to be about revelatory moments such as these, I can't stop myself from sharing ...
Having blogged twice -- here and here -- about the September massacre by government forces in the west African nation of Guinea, I hope we're all keeping an eye on the story. Before I turn to a close-up view of the suffering, I want to note that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has brought ...
Drug-war dispatches out of Mexico, Pakistan's seeming inability to control its tribal areas, and Jon Lee Anderson's recent reporting on the largely lawless swaths of Rio de Janeiro lodged a question in my mind: How many people in the world live in places where no government actually governs? The ...
I can't blog forthrightly about the remote-control assassinations detailed this week in The New Yorker without first alerting readers to my bias -- a bias that's more about pragmatism and temperament than about ideology or respect for U.S. law. For the same reasons that this Global Pedestrian blog ...
Fittingly, it was my wife who pointed me to a great little story in the Washington Post about how some women in India are refusing to get married until the would-be groom secures a toilet for the couple's future home. The story seems charming but frivolous until you read that "665 million people in ...