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Now a newsletterer?

After twenty years of blogging, I have followed my fellow netizens to Substack, where I am publishing a weekly newsletter. You can subscribe via the form to the left and please drop me a note with a link to your newsletter.

Taking Notes

Thinking out loud in my corner of the internets.

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I’ve been writing here for over a decade now. In hindsight, only a handful of those posts are still worth reading.

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Latest Essays

The State of Online Subtitling

In a recent post, "Indigenous Protests, Wikileaks and Online Subtitles" I focused on the social and historical importance of adding subtitles to online video, especially as it relates to those who promote human rights and inclusive rural development. Most of the post...

Indigenous Protests, Wikileaks and Online Subtitles

In June 2009, residents of Lima realized just how far removed their urban media were from the reality of daily life in the north of Peru. Peruvian protesters in June 2009 at Devil's Curve. Photograph by Enrique Castro-Mendivil. The Protest Earlier in the...

[Impunity in Peru] The Importance of Civil Society

In April 2009 Aldo Panfichi, a professor at Peru's Pontificia Universidad Católica and consultant for OSI's Latin America Program (disclosure: my current employer), carried out a survey of 462 residents of Lima about their perceptions of NGO's. He found that...

Citizen Journalism and Drug Trafficking in Mexico

My feelings about the coverage of organized crime, drug trafficking, and violence in Mexico are many, and they are complicated. I am disappointed by the focus on violence — rather than the causes of that violence — by the Mexican media. But I am far more bothered by...

Taxis in Lima

One of the most refreshing books I've read this year has been Khaled al-Khamissi's Taxi. (A kind gift from Noha.) It's nothing but a slim collection or three-page vignettes that recall conversations with taxi drivers around Cairo. In aggregate these vignettes afford...

More Open, Less Hypocritical

Over the past couple months I have met two people for the first time that - in some ways - might know me better than some of my closest friends and family. Adriana and Elena Mary. I can't tell you much of what they've been up to over the past couple years, but back in...