The shared history of Britain and Burma

Thant Myint-U wrote in Telegraph about "Britain's connections to Burma go a long way back, especially in the little villages and towns of the Irrawaddy delta now wrecked by Cyclone Nargis."

The $3 Trillion War

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes published an excerpt on Vanity Fair:

After wildly lowballing the cost of the Iraq conflict at a mere $50 to $60 billion, the Bush administration has been concealing the full economic toll. The spending on military operations is merely the tip of a vast fiscal iceberg. In an excerpt from their new book, the authors calculate the grim bottom line.

John Perkins on Nationalization of Panama Canal

The "Economic Hit Man” John Perkins Recounts US Efforts to Block Nationalization of Panama Canal on democracynow.org:

Panamanian President Martin Torrijos was in Washington earlier this week to discuss a pending free trade agreement with the United States, where he drew praise from President Bush on winning national approval for the $5.2 billion expansion plan for the Panama Canal. But three decades ago the moves to nationalize the Panama Canal by President Torrijos’s father, General Omar Torrijos, met with enormous resistance in this country.

Authors@Google: Kelly McMasters

Apr 2008


(54 min)

Kelly McMasters, the writer, presents her new book "Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town":

it tells the story of growing up in Shirley, NY and the realization that the neighboring Brookhaven National Laboratory was polluting the land and drinking water on Long Island. Through well researched evidence, Kelly links cancer clusters around Shirley to the nuclear site, and weaves a touching story of friendship and loss in her hometown.

She also teaches writing at mediabistro.com and the undergraduate writing program and Journalism Graduate School at Columbia University.

Jeffrey Sachs explains how to save the world

in Telegraph today.

Ideas in the air

(Picture: Barry Blitt)

Malcolm Gladwell writes in the New Yorker ("Annels of innovation: In the air", 12 May 2008) about innovation: "Who says big ideas are rare? The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time."

Michael Oren: America and the Middle East

Speech in University of California
Mar 2008

(57 min)

Authors@Google: Michael Oren
Feb 2008

(58 min)

Michael Oren is a renowned scholar on the Middle East

whose previous books have received much acclaim including "Six Days of War" which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and also made the New York Times bestseller list. In addition to his many historical books he is also known for his fiction.

Mr. Oren, Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jeruslame, specializes in the diplomatic and military history of the Middle East. He has written extensively for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic, of which he is a contributing editor.

Michael Oren speaks on his newest book "Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present"

Many European countries have long explored and documented their historic relationship with the Middle East, but Oren found such an account lacking in the American canon. His most recent book "Power, Faith and Fantasy" attempts to rectify this oversight by beginning with a look at the 18th century and then leads the reader up into the increasing complex present day.

Michael Wood: The Story of India (BBC) (Part 4)

Episode 4
Ages of Gold


(60 min)

In the episode of the BBC documentary The Story of India:

Michael Wood seeks out the achievements of the country’s golden age, discovering how India discovered zero, calculated the circumference of the Earth and wrote the world’s first sex guide, the Kama Sutra. In the south, he visits the giant temple of Tanjore and sees traditional bronze casters, working as their ancestors did 1,000 years ago.

Robert Fisk and Noam Chomsky: War, Geopolitics, and History - Conflict in Middle East

Apr 2007


(1 hr 42 min)

Robert Fisk (correspondent of the Independent) with an introduction of Noam Chomsky (professor, linguistics, MIT) presents:

Robert Fisk of the UK-based publication, The Independent, recounts his experiences traveling around the world and living in the Middle East, Fisk speaks on history and geopolitics in the Middle East.

His focus is on the problems with journalism in the United States, which include an over-reliance on what government authorities say and the common mode of reporting 'from Baghdad' but entirely within the confines of a hotel room. Using newspaper articles and speeches from politicians, Fisk illustrates the lack of concern for Iraqis as human beings. Fisk's talk also looks at the Armenian genocide, which was downplayed in Western media. After the talk, Fisk fields questions ranging from the rumors of civil war in Iraq to the situation in Lebanon.

The timeline:

2:20 Chomsky's intro
18:55 Fisk's presentation
1:13:00 Q&A

Authors@Google: Noam Chomsky

Apr 2008


(53 min)

About the speaker:

For the past forty years Noam Chomsky's writings on politics and language have established him as a preeminent public intellectual and as one of the most original and wide-ranging political and social critics of our time. Among the seminal figures in linguistic theory over the past century, since the 1960s Chomsky has also secured a place as perhaps the leading dissident voice in the United States.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT and the author of numerous books including Chomsky vs. Foucault: A Debate on Human Nature, On Language, Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship, and Towards a New Cold War (all published by The New Press). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Q&A time from the 1st min:

01:00 About universal grammar
17:00 about young generation
27:50 internet as media to manufacture consent
37:30 application of some terms and their meanings in mass media
50:00 language in email writing

How Ant Colonies Get Things Done

Apr 2008


(66 min)

Dr. Deborah Gordon, the biological science professor, presents:

Ant colonies operate without central control; there is no one in charge and no ant directs the behavior of others.

Colonies perform many tasks including foraging, nest construction, and care of the young. Task allocation is the process that adjusts the numbers of workers performing each task, according to the current situation. How do colonies get ants to show up at a picnic, and what determines which ants go?

Experiments with harvester ants show that task allocation arises from a dynamical network of brief interactions. Which task an ant performs, and whether it performs it actively at that moment, depends on its recent rate of encounter with other ants. The dynamics of task allocation changes as colonies grow older and larger: larger colonies are more stable than younger, smaller ones, although since ant turnover is high, older colonies do not contain older ants.

Ant colony organization provides an interesting model for investigating network behavior and the function of network size.

Walter Russell Mead: US foreign policy and the American political tradition

Feb 2003


(58 min)

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes historian Walter Russell Mead for a discussion of the economic and social forces shaping the new directions of U.S. foreign policy.