In The News

Spreading Digital Revolution in a Cuban Living Room

Nick Miroff April 12, 2010
Yoani Sanchez, the Cuban blogger who was been recognized internationally for her Generation Y blog, hosts a Blogger Academy to teach other Cubans the skills required to participate in social media, including Twitter, blogging, and Wikipedia. While the Cuban government has not shown any intentions to shut down the Blogger Academy, it continues to view Sanchez as “part of an aggressive US foreign...

Muslim Pop Culture on the Rise in Indonesia

Solenn Honorine April 8, 2010
Due to the economic crisis that hit Indonesia in the late 1990s, the government of longtime dictator Suharto fell and gave rise to democratic elections. Along with democracy came religious freedom, which for many Indonesians has meant becoming more devout Muslims. As a result, Muslim pop culture, whether manifested in books, television shows, movies, ringtones, or otherwise, has become a central...

Lady Gaga Versus Mideast Peace

Bret Stephens April 6, 2010
The conventional wisdom in recent weeks has been that Israeli settlements in Palestine inflame anti-American sentiments in the region and harm American interests. But this opinion article argues that a major source of grievance for Palestinians is global American culture, represented, in this instance, by hyper-sexualized people such as the performer Lady Gaga. Sayyid Qutb, a mid-twentieth...

Freedom Is Not Found Online

Aditya Chakrabortty April 1, 2010
The growth of the internet has long been perceived as a key to globalizing the notion of a free society as championed by the West. But world leaders like Bill Clinton and dot-com boomers alike now sound naïve to have thought the web's spread could seamlessly produce a "borderless" world of free expression. These "cyber-utopians" failed to realize that the Internet, like...

World's Biggest Cities Merging Into 'Mega-Regions'

John Vidal March 29, 2010
A new UN report charts the growth of mega-regions – clusters of cities that may stretch across countries and include more than 100 million people. With half the world now dwelling in cities and the pace of urbanization only expected to increase, mega-regions may displace countries to become the principal locii of economic growth. Already, mega-regions account for outsized percentages of global...

International Adoption: A Big Fix Brings Dramatic Decline

Scott Baldauf, Sarah E. Burton, Ezra Fieser, Kathie Klarreich, Fred Weir March 26, 2010
In recent years, increased publicity has both heightened demand for adoption and exposed the sometimes-dark underbelly of international adoption agencies. The ongoing case of American missionaries accused of trafficking children in quake-stricken Haiti serves as a prime example of the shadier side of an often unregulated industry prone to corruption. Overall, the trend is for adoption hubs like...

Canada's Veiled Immigration Problems

Sandro Contenta March 24, 2010
As with France's decision to ban the niqab or Muslim headscarf, a recent row in Quebec over the wearing of the veil in a government French class has elicited strong reactions from the public. Despite being worn by only the smallest minority of Muslim women, the veil often represents for Westerners their uncertainty toward relations with the Islamic world. In Quebec, where identity is...