Journalist and author of The Prince and the Poisoner
Three from the NatGeo blog: On the trail of endangered pangolins from Africa to restaurants in China; wrestling as peacebuilding in South Sudan; and an unprecedented scientific investigation into neonatal death in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.
Aid organizations have long struggled with the issue of how to get donors engaged. Faced with the choice of making supporters feel they’re singlehandedly saving the world versus showering them with administrative details about vaccines, food, and emergency tarps, it’s not surprising many choose to emphasize the individual, be it your individual contribution, a single (usually famous) interlocutor, ala Nicholas Kristof or Angelina Jolie, or individual beneficiaries. People want to feel connected.
Two recent pieces for the New York Times/International Herald Tribune‘s Latitude blog:
India’s Political Blasphemy, on the Salman Rushdie affair earlier this month at the Jaipur Literary Festival.
Come Hell With High Water, on Bangladesh’s approach to global climate change.
Next up: India’s gangster parliamentarians.
This post first appeared at National Geographic, and references “Feral Cats and Social Indicators”, my latest piece at The New York Times’ Latitude blog
The photo you see above is of an adorable stray cat that’s living like a squatter at Bangladesh’s biggest children’s hospital.
The kitty could be called adorable, if a little standoffish. It’s also something of a scourge: Cats shouldn’t be allowed to roam the open halls and wards of a hospital, certainly not one treating vulnerable newborns.
My most recent piece for the New York Times’ Latitude blog looks at a terrible attack that one such stray made on a six-day-old infant, and how such incidents deflect attention from the strong gains Bangladesh is making in terms of health and development. Continue reading “Bangladesh: Feral Cats and Social Indicators”
A fake Dior bag, even one you know is fake, can still provide a little pleasure. Why? It looks nice. And it holds within it the comfort of the familiar and the aspired-to.
This first occurred to me last year, thousands of miles from Dior’s Paris and New York’s Chinatown, when I laid eyes on Bangladesh’s fake Taj Mahal.
The fake Taj is a tribute to a tribute. A souvenir snow globe for a country that has never seen snow. Continue reading “Bangladesh’s P.T. Barnum & His Knock Off Taj”
