“30 Little Turtles” opens with an anecdote about Thomas Friedman’s recital of a short paragraph designed to help Indian call center workers adapt their accent to sound more North American. But there is more to this paragraph than simply helping Indians to sound more American, for “there were many turtle battles for less than oodles of noodles” ( ( Read more... )

“I Agree With Me” was hard to follow and took some thought to understand. P.J. O’Rourke’s references to pundits were foreign, and his colloquialisms were unfamiliar. What exactly “a stalking horse” (91) is I don’t know, and I only have a vague notion of The O’Reilly Factor. When you consider his purpose and audience, however, his method is very ( Read more... )

 Terrible things are done when we go to war; terrible things continue when we don’t. In “Japan’s Kamikaze Pilots and Contemporary Suicide Bombers: War and Terror”, Yuki Tanaka begins a conversation on the issue of suicide attacks. Killing for a cause is hard enough, and dying for one is even harder; Tanaka explores the mindset of those who do both ( Read more... )

 In my life I have come across only one person who did not to like music, or at least claimed not to. Nathan, a childhood friend, had no music: no CDs, no tapes, nothing. When I asked him about this, he claimed quite matter-of-factly “Oh, I don’t like music.” I remember this because it struck me as quite odd and still does. That someone should not ( Read more... )

To Taiaiake Alfred the struggle of indigenous people “is to restore the connections severed by the colonial machine.” This struggle has always felt beyond my understanding as I simply lack the context and perspective to identify with Canada’s First Nations. I have never been oppressed or colonized, never been the victim of racism, and never had my ( Read more... )

On its surface “On Dumpster Diving” is just that; it is on Dumpster diving. The quality and quantity of what you can find in a Dumpster would easily lead you to conclusions about wastefulness and consumption. Eighner, however, says he would “prefer to live the comfortable consumer life, perhaps-and only perhaps-as a slightly less wasteful consumer ( Read more... )

 Suzuki’s opening statement - “the best guide we have to help us through the maze of ethical questions that are created by genetic engineering is history; we forget its lesson at the risk of repeating the same mistakes” - is repeated in several different ways throughout “Genetics After Auschwitz”; it is safe to say that this statement is his main ( Read more... )

“AIDS has taken countries by the throat and reduced them to spectral caricatures of their formal selves.” A somewhat haunting sentence by its own merit now leaves me chilled and reflective. It seems an understatement to say Stephen Lewis used “anecdotes as the narrative vehicle, in order to give the pandemic an accessible face”, but, by sharing his ( Read more... )

 “This is a difficult” blog “to write, because I’m no longer sure who” Margaret Atwood’s Letter to America was for. “Some of you may be having the same trouble ( Read more... )