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Where does language come from?
“How do we understand what words really mean? New science suggests we make meaning by creating mental simulations.
Making meaning is one of the most important things we do. For starters, it’s something we’re doing almost constantly. We swim in a sea of words. Every day, we hear and read tens of thousands of them. And somehow, for the most part, we understand them. Constantly, tirelessly, automatically, we make meaning. What’s perhaps most remarkable about it is that we hardly notice we’re doing anything at all. There are deep, rapid, complex operations afoot under the surface of the skull, and yet all we experience is seamless understanding.Making meaning is one of the most important things we do. For starters, it’s something we’re doing almost constantly. We swim in a sea of words. Every day, we hear and read tens of thousands of them. And somehow, for the most part, we understand them. Constantly, tirelessly, automatically, we make meaning. What’s perhaps most remarkable about it is that we hardly notice we’re doing anything at all. There are deep, rapid, complex operations afoot under the surface of the skull, and yet all we experience is seamless understanding.”
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The trial: Egypt’s NGO staffers speak up about political dogfight
“The fate of Egypt’s civil society remains hung in the balance as the Egyptian government struggles to redraft controversial NGO legislation and civic associations await the verdict of the foreign NGO trial, which was recently adjourned for the tenth time.”
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What it was like to work at Newsweek at its best.
“Tina Brown, the founder of the Daily Beast and editor of Newsweek, announced this week that the print magazine was headed to the morgue file, dead after nearly 80 years. A digital offering called Newsweek Global will take its place. Those of us who worked at Newsweek through the turn of the century wish the new venture well, but we can’t escape the feeling that there’s been a death in the family.
Until the Washington Post Co. sold the magazine in 2010, I qualified as a “lifer,” a concept that no longer exists in the American workplace. Over nearly three decades at Newsweek in the pre-tweet era, I was the magazine’s media critic and later a columnist. I interviewed and wrote about five American presidents and authored more than 50 stories, almost all of them on domestic affairs.”
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Why Women Still Can’t Walk Into A Cafe
“CASABLANCA – Cafés are a public space like any other. Theoretically, nothing prevents women from entering one. But too many women still will not frequent certain cafés, which are always occupied almost entirely by men.
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Obviously, we are not talking about chic cafés in the center of town. When they have the choice, some women prefer to go to more expensive cafés just to avoid harassment.
Using a video camera, we conducted a series of interviews in a café in downtown Casablanca. It is interesting to see that opinions on this topic varied greatly. It may seem mundane at first glance, but this is a sensitive subject. Many people refused to answer us or to be filmed. In the café where we carried out our inquiry, the proportion of women was minuscule, and among the women, only one was alone.” -
The newsonomics of The New York Times’ expanding global strategy
“This has been the year of global expansion for the world’s biggest news companies. The Wall Street Journal launched its Deutschland digital edition in January, and Alisa Bowen, WSJ’s head of product, tells me additional international expansion, along with video, is a top 2013 priority. The Financial Times, which had retrenched from non-English language initiatives a number of years ago, just launched a new Latin American homepage on FT.com and rolled out a new mobile app for the region, while initiating “digital printing” through HP. Reuters and Bloomberg have both also upped their presence in the market. For the Times, the Brazil edition follows on its China edition launch in June. (For more on this developing phenomenon, see “The newsonomics of global media imperative”).
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The killing fields
“IS IT because America and Europe have tired of their own wars that they have started to turn their back on other people’s? The number of dead in Syria has passed 30,000. Some days over 250 bodies are added to the pile, which brings to mind Iraq at the insurgency’s peak in 2006-07. Were the next few months to stretch into years, as now seems likely, Syria’s great cities would be ground to rubble and the whole Middle East would choke on the dust.
To prevent this catastrophe, NATO needs to start making the humanitarian and strategic case for intervening in Syria. Grounding President Bashar Assad’s air force could save many thousands of lives. Giving the rebels scope to organise and train could help bring the war to an end. Speeding the fall of Mr Assad might give Syria a chance to re-emerge as a nation at peace with itself and its neighbours.”
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Thirteen Habits of Highly Effective Freelance Journalists
“Colleen Kimmett and The Tyee hosted a series of four expert-led panels called Freelance Survival, to give freelancers practical tools and tips from those already making a living in the industry. Thursday night’s session was called “Freelancers: Save Time, Make Money!” and featured three folks with various expertise in said tools. First was Frances Bula, a columnist for Vancouver magazine and Urban Fix and a regular contributor to the Globe and Mail. She was followed by Trish Mau, an expert in online and database searches who works for public libraries, and then Phillip Smith, The Tyee’s digital publishing consultant, technologist and an online advocacy specialist who works to advance the field of news innovation through Mozilla and The Tyee.”
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NPR leader outlines strategies for digital survival
When Gary E. Knell took over as CEO of NPR in 2011, his assignment was clear, if daunting: “to provide an economically sustainable platform for journalists.” Knell, who spoke at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism on Monday, joined NPR at a time when the organization faced not only internal strife, but also a business environment still reeling from a decade of digital disruption. His response was that of a realist. “You can’t stop technology. People will demand programming when and where they want it,” Knell said. “To not be in the digital space means you’ll be replaced. And you’ll never come back.”
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Gender segregation increasing in Iran’s universities
“On August 6, with the new academic year approaching, the government-backed Mehr News Agency in Iran posted a bulletin that 36 universities in the country had excluded women from 77 fields of study. The reported restrictions aroused something of an international uproar. Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights lawyer and Nobel laureate exiled in Britain, wrote a letter to Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, and Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, condemning the measure as “part of the recent policy of the Islamic Republic, which tries to return women to the private domain inside the home as it cannot tolerate their passionate presence in the public arena.” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland read a statement on August 21 calling upon “Iranian authorities to protect women’s rights and to uphold Iran’s own laws and international obligations, which guarantee non-discrimination in all areas of life, including access to education.”
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Internet anti-censorship tools are being overwhelmed by demand
“U.S.-funded programs to beat back online censorship are increasingly finding a ready audience in repressive countries, with more than 1 million people a day using online tools to get past extensive blocking programs and government surveillance. But the popularity of those initiatives has become a liability.”
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Journalism, youth and politics in Jordan
Journalism, youth and politics in Jordan. AmenFM (Arabic Channel) 89.5. Guest Speaker on ‘Successful Women” with Suheir Jeridat.
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Freedom of Expression in Egypt’s Draft Constitution
Egypt is in the midst of a vitally important phase in its democratic transition, and a vibrant debate is ongoing over the nature of its constitutional protections for human rights. In order to provide support to this discussion, the Centre for Law and Democracy today released a set of Comments on the Freedom of Expression and Information Clauses in the Draft Constitution for Egypt.
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Morocco Cracks Down on Democracy Rappers
The North African country has locked up musicians deemed to be critical of the state. Now one jailed rapper’s entourage is fighting against time to get his message out and rally the country’s floundering democracy movement.
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Interview with Janine Di Giovanni
Posted by James McAuley
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“Janine di Giovanni is a war reporter who has covered nearly every major violent conflict since the late nineteen-eighties. But in her most recent book, “Ghosts by Daylight,” she focusses her reporting skills on a different sort of struggle: that of trying to live a normal life as a wife and mother in light of the horrors she’s witnessed. As her marriage, to another war reporter, crumbles (the two are separated), di Giovanni reflects on learning to speak the languages of war, of destruction, and, finally, of love…” -
Syrian Refugees Flood Into Neighboring Jordan
Radio show: As the conflict in Syria rages on, thousands of refugees — some 200,000 in total — are fleeing to neighboring countries. The United Nations estimates that there are over 85,000 refugees currently in Jordan, the most of any neighboring country.”
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Battling over Meaning of Free Expression
“For Tunisian artist Nadia Jelassi, the trouble started in June when her sculptures, along with those of other artists, went on display at a Tunis gallery. Jelassi’s sculptures featured female mannequins in conservative Islamic dress that included robes, with their hair covered. The work was surrounded by a bed of smooth stones. Jelassi says everything was fine until the last day of the exhibit, when a man taking photos asked that some of the artwork be taken down.
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“Of course we refused,” she says. “But before long he came back with a group of bearded men. They scrawled ‘Death to Blasphemous Artists’ on the gallery walls, and later that night broke into the building and destroyed many of the pieces.” -
Blog: NEO-COLONIALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
A blog of interest on various issues; insights on the Mideast.
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“A bit about me: I’m 23, I’m half-Dutch, half-Egyptian, and I grew up in Lusaka, Zambia. I moved to Egypt for university, where I studied sociology, psychology & anthropology. Then I moved to the Netherlands, where I got an MA in Islam in the West and then another one in Development Studies. I just started a PhD.” -
Teaching journalists to read
“Every six months or so, The Audit, CJR’s financial-journalism blog, holds a breakfast to update interested parties on how the blog is doing. Each breakfast has an invited speaker, and so it was that I found myself at 7:45 this morning in a very posh Upper East Side club, being offered an array of ties to choose from before being allowed upstairs to take my seat between Nicholas Lemann and Victor Navasky.
The main thrust of my speech, which rapidly became a spirited and high-level discussion, was that journalistic entities — newspapers, magazines, websites, and, yes, Columbia J-school itself — have to start putting much more emphasis on reading, as opposed to writing.”
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When Satire Conquered Iran by Slavs and Tatars
“Published between 1906 and 1930, Molla Nasreddin was a satirical Azeri magazine edited by the writer Jalil Mammadguluzadeh (1866-1932), and named after Nasreddin, the legendary Sufi wise man-cum-fool of the Middle Ages. With an acerbic sense of humor and realist illustrations reminiscent of a Caucasian Honoré Daumier or Toulouse-Lautrec, Molla Nasreddin attacked the hypocrisy of the Muslim clergy, the colonial policies of the US and European nations towards the rest of the world, and the venal corruption of the local elite, while arguing repeatedly for Westernization, educational reform, and equal rights for women. Publishing such stridently anti-clerical material, in a Muslim country, in the early twentieth century, was done at no small risk to the editorial team. Members of MN were often harassed, their offices attacked, and on more than one occasion, Mammadguluzadeh had to escape from protesters incensed by the contents of the magazine.”
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A voice of Morocco’s democracy
“I first spoke to Moroccan civil liberty activist Maria Karim in May, before her friend and colleague, rapper Lhaqed (the enraged) was sentenced to one year in prison for insulting authorities with a music video made for his song Kleb Adawla, Dog of the State.
Tomorrow, Karim will stand trial for allegedly insulting a prosecutor representing the state in the Lhaqed trial.
Then as now, I was impressed by Karim’s laughter – it creeps up at the most inopportune moments in our conversations.
“In Morocco, we don’t need Kafka,” she said today, over the phone from Casablanca, laughing.
“Every day in our country is a testament to absurdity.”
It’s not for me to say if the laughter comes from fear, existentialism, indifference – feigned or real or a courage of conviction. Here is a transcript of our conversation…”
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Arab Spring nations don’t yet grasp freedom of dissent – CNN.com
“The fall of dictatorships does not guarantee the creation of free societies. There is often a period in which we witness the legacy of tyranny. The Arab uprisings have overthrown tyrants in Egypt and Libya, but the populations and lawmakers have yet to grasp that democracy is not only about free elections but creating free societies.
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When sexual harassment of women increases on the streets of Egypt, when centuries-old shrines of Muslim saints are destroyed with explosives in Libya, when screenings of films such as “Persepolis” trigger riots in Tunisia and Christian minorities across the Middle East feel under siege, then we must stop pretending that all is well with the Arab Spring. But all is not lost either.” -
Good films are back in season
“The Toronto Film Festival is universally considered the opening of Academy Awards season, and the weary moviegoer, drained after a summer of exhausted superheroes and franchises, plunges in it with joy. I’ve been attending since 1977, and have watched it grow from a bootstrap operation, with the schedule improvised from day to day, into one of the big four (with Cannes, Venice and Berlin).”
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Salwa Publishers
“Salwa Publishers” is an independent publishing house established in 1996 in Jordan.
It specializes in Arabic picture books for children, for ages ranging from newborns to 13 years old. Salwa Publishers has recently expanded into the digital electronic media by producing applications, ebooks, interactive CDs, DVDs, and audio books.
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Writing Rules From Zadie Smith
“In the winter of 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing published in the New York Times nearly a decade earlier, The Guardian reached out to some of today’s most celebrated authors and asked them to each offer his or her 10 rules. My favorite is Zadie Smith’s list—an exquisite balance of the practical, the philosophical, and the poetic…”
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Reporting on Poverty
Following three years of research in an Indian slum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist discusses what language can’t express, her view that nobody is representative, and the ethical dilemmas of writing about the poor.
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