One year ago almost to the day, the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was found slain in her apartment building in Moscow, shot through the head. For years, Politkovskaya’s hard-hitting investigative reporting had told stories of the brutality and corruption of Russia’s ‘dirty war’ in Chechnya that most of the international media had ceased to write about. Through arrests, death threats, and a near-poisoning—and in a media increasingly controlled by the state and its oligarchs—the unflinching Politkovskaya never slowed down.
In "Kid Nation," CBS’s most talked—about new show, forty children—carefully selected to reflect multi-culturalism—are on a mission. Their task is to rebuild the New Mexico ghost town of "Bonanza City." Can they do it, we are prodded to wonder? Can forty American children create a viable society from desolate wasteland?
“What did you do this summer?” is the question hot off of everyone’s tongue, and each person I run into has a riveting reply. So many of our friends and acquaintances were busy traveling outside of the so-called First World, or researching strands of devastating viruses, or teaching ESL to underprivileged youth before hopping on the L train back to Brooklyn. We are a school of young people who want to save the world, the very noblest of pursuits. Yet come September, when we return to Middletown, we retreat into worthy academia and joyful partying ’til dawn (COLLEGE!). And on the day that inebriation grows monotonous, we pine for remote, exotic villages, or for our urban summer locales, ultimately recoiling into the secure comfort of that good ol’ “Wesleyan bubble.”
Some forty stories up in the new One World Trade Center building in Manhattan, next to a framed-yet-scrapped post-election cover of Hillary Clinton looking out the Oval Office window under a full moon, Emily Greenhouse ’08 sifts through an atlas-sized magazine draft while referencing a nearly indecipherable flow chart that hangs from the ceiling to the floor. At just age 30, […]
I read Emily Greenhouse’s article about teaching European children about the Holocaust in this Friday’s Argus (“Emdashes: Teach your children well,” Feb. 29, vol. CXLIII, no. 33) with great interest and found it quite thought provoking. Unfortunately, I was appalled to come to the end of the piece and find the sentence “For all of the mistakes that the Germans have made in the past, the comic book might be a better, more responsibly accessible teaching method than that suggested by Sarkozy.”