I’m collecting soil samples from every country in the world. Call it an effort to find common ground (literally).
I’m Digging Up Dirt in 193 Countries. Here’s Why.
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Culture
3 Big Benefits for Americans to Ending the Cuba Embargo
Cuba has a lot more to offer the United States than just rum and cigars.
Updating German Thrift for the Age of Austerity
Thriftiness has served Germany well in the past, but the German culture of austerity suffers from selective memory.
Pepsi, Pot, Porn…and Politics
News sources have recently reported on an interesting assortment of materials at Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. Not only was bin Laden living far from any cave on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, his house apparently had a large supply of Pepsi and Coke (inexplicably, Pakola wasn’t good enough), a significant stash of pornography, and marijuana plants on the property.
Postcard From…Bhutan
Thimphu, the capital of the Himalayan nation of Bhutan, wore its culture on its sleeve for the 16th South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit at the end of April. The uniform architecture of the buildings and colorful flags fluttering on both sides of the streets welcomed delegates from the nine member states (Nepal, India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Afghanistan) and the nine observer states, including China and the United States. Bhutan’s display of its culture was a strong assertion of its sovereignty, as well as its distinctiveness from neighbors India and China.
The Big Yam
Headquarters was worried. Complaints were flooding in from the Chinese countryside about the quality of the new Haier washing machines. The water pipes were defective, the peasants told the Chinese manufacturer. But when the Haier team went to investigate, they were surprised to discover that the pipes were not broken or poorly fitted. Rather, they were clogged with yam skins. The peasants had been washing their dinner ingredients, not their clothes. An American manufacturer might have lectured the consumers about the proper uses of a washing machine. Haier’s CEO, Zhang Ruimin, decided instead to design a machine with wider pipes that could wash both clothes and large root vegetables. He called it the Big Yam, and the machine became a big seller in the Chinese countryside.
Music to Save the World
If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution, feminist anarchist Emma Goldman famously said. Fortunately, this year, world revolution had a great soundtrack. It was a breakthrough year for musicians fighting the good fight. Check out the following 10 albums, which Foreign Policy In Focus recommends for your end-of-the-year celebrations.
The Poetics of Botero’s Abu Ghraib Paintings
Rose Marie Berger and Joseph Ross co-edited the collection, Cut Loose the Body: An Anthology of Poems on Torture and Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib Paintings in conjunction with an exhibition of the Botero paintings at the American University Museum in Washington, DC. Here, they talk with FPIF’s E. Ethelbert Miller about what inspired them to work on this project.
Venezuelan Youth Street Culture Festival
The brim of a young hip-hop artist’s beige beanie hides a quarter of his face as his peers observe cross-legged from the concrete below. His cheek and lips grip the microphone intensely. The timid posture of his thinly adolescent frame can barely contain the newly found power and energy budding from each stomp he plants on the rickety stage in a weedy university parking lot in Mérida, Venezuela.