Speaking of food, now that sushi has been globalized, GOOD Magazine asks: which regional dish will become the new new thing? I vote for mangosteens. Or bibimbap. Or dosas.
(Via World Hum.)
Roger Cohen in the IHT:
HONG KONG: It’s the end of the era of the white man.
I know your head is spinning. The world can feel like one of those split-screen TVs with images of a suicide bombing in Baghdad flashing, and the latest awful market news coursing along the bottom, and an ad for some […]
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Also tagged Asia, IHT
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What does ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s recent return to Thailand mean for Manchester City, the English Premier League team he purchased during his exile? What does his return mean for football (soccer) in Thailand?
That was the subject of an AFP story that I wrote last week.
You can find it on Yahoo News […]
It’s been a tense week in the Andes. On Saturday, Colombian forces launched a surprise raid on a camp inside the Ecuador border and killed a senior FARC member. The result has been an ongoing diplomatic kerfuffle between Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela.
AFP has a run-down of the events: “Regional tensions rise after Colombia raid into […]
A recent episode of Marketplace — one of my favorite podcasts — contained an excellent story from Ruxandra Guidi. It’s about how cars that were damaged by hurricane Katrina have ended up for sale in Bolivia. While the automobiles may look fine, many are mechanically beyond repair.
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I’ve got a travel story in today’s New York Times. It’s about how Bangkok’s legendary Khao San Road, long a meeting place for backpackers, now offers a variety of upscale amenities.
Simon Romero had an excellent story in the New York Times yesterday about Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, fighting to defeat the high-altitude soccer ban I mentioned recently. I particularly like the lede (as well as the delightful image, above):
Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, donned a green jersey the other day, watched a llama sacrifice […]
Jay McInerney reviews two new books that “attempt to account for the transformation of sushi from a provincial street snack to the international luxury cuisine of the 21st century.”
(Cartoon via.)
Strange Maps on the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World:
On this map, East and West Germany are next to each other, as one would expect. But Romania’s closest neighbour is Armenia? And Poland and India are side by side? Well, this is not a straightforward geographical map, but a cultural one. It plots out how […]
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Here’s a great IHT story by Somini Sengupta about outside influences creeping into Bhutan.
Once, Bhutan guarded itself from the world outside so ardently that it allowed in satellite television only seven years ago. Today, globalization is officially sanctioned, and it is rushing in fast.
Today, at least here in the capital, outside and inside coexist.
Tall white […]
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Here’s another great IHT story, this one from Clifford J. Levy. It’s a playful look at the psychological complications involved in using an Internet phone service to forward local calls to your cell phone abroad. (I use Skype to receive calls dialed to a DC area code number; they’re sent straight to my cell phone […]
Thanks to Google Quechua, Indigenous people in the Andes can now search the Web in their native tongue.
Economist:
Estimates of the prevalence of Quechua vary widely. In Peru, there are thought to be 3m to 4.5m speakers, with others in Bolivia and Ecuador. The language has long been in slow decline, chiefly because the children of […]
The New York Times’s Noam Cohen has an interesting story about efforts to advance a simplified version of English to be used around the world — what some are calling “globish.”
When its president proposed last month to ban English words like “helicopter,” “chat” and “pizza,” Iran became the latest country to try to fight the […]
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To the People:
The Prospect reviews superstar Senegalese footballer Patrick Vieira’s new autobiography and says it “confirms that soccer beats banking as the world’s most globalised industry.” I’d say drugs, but soccer and banking make fine choices, too.
“Vieira was only 19 and already captain of Cannes when, in 1995, he was bundled into a helicopter and […]
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Also tagged Soccer
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According to the NYT’s Juan Forero, coca-legalization proponent and indigenous coalition leader Evo Morales just might become the next president of Bolivia.
The election of Morales in Bolivia would represent the triumph of indigenous groups over the minority white elite ruling class — as well as the rejection of what’s viewed as American imperialism and the […]