Blogs

As a frequent traveler, I am struck by how much international travel has changed over the last three decades, much of it for the worse. Especially distressing is the manic security at airports which began with the highjackings of the 1970s and escalated following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States, and has been ratcheted up with every new threat, real and imagined. It now takes ingenuity to even travel with toiletries.  read more »

These are definitely not the best of times for Gloria Steinem and the “gender trouble” radicals in her flock.  read more »

Conventional wisdom, at least in the academic world, states that the colonial "divide and rule" policy created the acrimonious institution of "tribes" by freezing African identities and favoring one group frozen in that identity to the detriment of the others. The Tutsi of Rwanda and the Agikuyu of Kenya are often cited as examples of those who were favored; but upon close examination of history, this thesis reveals some loopholes.

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The current issue of Foreign Policy magazine (May/June 2008) has a list of what the magazine says are the top 100 public intellectuals living today. The subjective nature of the definition "public intellectual", and the names of people I notice included, and left out, is enough to make me not take this exercise seriously.

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Academics are often accused of being preoccupied with theory rather than practice, and semantics instead of actions, while favoring microscopic details over the big picture. Scholars working on Africa, in particular, are often accused of being intellectually self-indulgent, while the continent faces an array of very real challenges.  read more »