Our reporters travel the globe. This is where they share their observations and experiences that don’t make it to the broadcast.
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Shooting on an iPhone in Afghanistan
I was slow to catch-on to phonecams. Until Teru Kuwayama asked me to join his Basetrack.org project in Afghanistan shooting on iPhones, in February 2011, I’d never taken a photo with a phonecam (with all the camera equipment I have, the last thing I thought I’d ever want was a telephone that took photographs) [...]
Ishinomaki
The only consoling thing I can say about this picture taken in Ishinomaki in northern Japan is that the woman who owns this piano was not killed by the tsunami. Nor was her mother who was in the car with her when the quake struck, nor her elderly father, whom the two women rushed back home to rescue before the monster wave engulfed the entire port and levelled it [...]
An Optimist
I’ve never before met anyone as thoroughly optimistic as Peruvian glaciologist Benjamin Morales. I asked him today if his rosy take on life began when he narrowly missed death in 1970. On May 31st 41 years ago Morales lunched near his home in the town of Yunguay. Despite protestations of friends who had joined him for the meal, he left just before 3 p.m. He had promised to drive his mother to another town. At 3:23, a powerful earthquake struck the region [...]
Last Rites in Hazmat Suits
Overheard from a frequent American visitor to Japan: “People in the States say Japan is so screwed. People in Tokyo say the north of Japan is so screwed. People in the north say Miyagi (where much of the tsunami damage occurred) is so screwed. People in Miyagi say Fukushima (where a lot of the current nuclear concern is focused) is so screwed. People in Fukushima say the people in the evacuation zone are so screwed. Those people say, ‘Well, at least it’s not a war.’” [...]
Ratko Mladic: The Hooligans’ Hero
The images of Ratko Mladic gracing Serbia’s front pages and newscasts showed a frail shell of the stocky former Bosnian Serb wartime commander who went into hiding 16 years ago. But his capture Thursday inspired a frenzied nighttime rage among several hundred mostly young men who played a cat-and-mouse game with riot police in Belgrade’s Republic Square, the nucleus of Serbia’s capital [...]
Apocalypse When?
Newton is Japan’s equivalent of Scientific American. The June issue (now almost off the newstands here) helps anxious Japanese better understand the historical patterns of seismic activity across their country, where those quakes have occured, and tries to establish a non-hysterical sense of when other large magnitude quakes like the one on March 11 might happen [...]
The News Behind the Non-News of Fukushima’s Multiple Meltdowns
The news from the owners of the Fukushima nuclear power plant this week that the fuel in all three of its operating reactors melted down soon after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami has elicited pretty much a collective global yawn. But there’s an important story behind the non-story [...]
Japan’s Banksy
At first no one noticed them, the visual footnotes created by Japan’s version of Banksy. The artists — for they are six, not one — go by the name Chim↑Pom. This had been one of the recent works by the shock-art collective. They discretely painted burned-out nuclear power plants over an existing mural at Tokyo’s busy Shibuya train station [...]
Returning Home to Japan
The flight attendants take away our breakfast trays, leaving less than an hour before landing at Tokyo’s Narita airport. I look at the flight map on the screen, and see the airplane icon hover over the northern tip of Honshu, the largest of the Japanese archipelago. The map shows Tokyo in the distance, and Fukushima in the forefront. I wonder if the airline’s flight map always showed this farming region. I wonder if it will now be an untouchable place in people’s minds, occupying the same place as Hiroshima and Nagasaki [...]
Waiting for Water
Steep conical hills of brown sand and stone ring the city of Lima. Massive cement water tanks cap many of the summits, some bearing a slogan of the city’s powerful water utility, Sedepal: Agua Para Todo (water for all). To an inhabitant of the eastern United States, where water is generally plentiful, and where few lack a working tap, the motto appears at first to be either simply a statement of fact or an easily achievable promise [...]
Tech Week in Review: May 20, 2011
Amazon has announced that e-books are outselling paper books on its website for the first time ever. But does that mean you can get rid of your bookshelves? That’s just one of the stories in Clark Boyd’s roundup of great global tech stories you might have missed this week.
Lima’s Brown Coast
Lima and its contiguous suburbs and shantytowns sprawl between a sand-brown desert of undulating hills on the east to the Pacific Ocean on the west. Today, accompanied by my translator, Dado, and driver, Juan Carlos, I sped down an avenue that hugs the shoreline [...]
Glacier Closeup
Nearly all the world’s tropical glaciers cap mountains of the Andes. If you wonder why, look at where the highest peaks in the tropics are located and you’ll have your answer. About three quarters of these glaciers top Peruvian peaks providing the South American country with a natural resource of immense value and justifiable pride. But Peru’s glaciers, like most glaciers in the world, are melting at an alarming rate [...]
Lima’s Future Water Shortage
As I type these words, I’m flying 39,000 feet over Ecuador. Shortly, I will land in Lima, a sprawling city of about nine million people. Lima is one of the cities of the world most immediately threatened by global warming. The city was built on the edge of a desert, one of the driest in the world. And its primary source of water is a small river, the Rimac. The Rimac’s water trickles of glaciers high in the Andes which, unfortunately for Limeños, are rapidly melting. Peru has lost about 30 percent of its glacial ice in the last 40 years [...]
Linguistic surrealism from China to Belgium
On the World in Words podcast, the trials, tribulations and silliness of living in Belgium, where most people define themselves not by nationality but by mother tongue. Also, arrested Chinese artist Ai Weiwei wrote a blog that was, if anything, even more provocative than his art. We hear from his English translator. And the latest children’s TV hit in the UK features Jamaican-British musical mice, with dialects that offend English purists.
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