Oil is at times called “black gold” because, like the metal, it is precious. Its discovery spurs avaricious rushes and crowns a nouveau-riche class in garish ostentation. Numerous books, films, and artworks have documented the familiar, shimmery promise of the commodity; and the predictable disappointment that follows. The peripatetic Polish foreign correspondent, Ryszard Kapuscinski, wrote […]
The Boston Globe – Willy Foote’s ICWA Fellowship inspired him to leave his job as a financial analyst to start Root Capital, a nonprofit social investment fund working in Latin American and Africa. This year Root Capital expects to have lent more than $1 billion to small buisnessses in the developing world. Foote and Cambridge-based Root Capital were featured in this […]
New York Magazine – Past Fellow Andrew Rice’s latest article examines the accomplishments of and opinions on New York’s mayor two years into his term. The piece, which is New York Magazine’s cover story this week, addresses de Blasio’s dismally low approval rating, despite the fact that the city is doing well quantifiably – with a […]
Nov. 1, 2015 OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — During their brief, failed coup last September, soldiers from Burkina Faso’s elite presidential guard moved swiftly through the capital, Ouagadougou, to assert control and stifle dissent. Driving in convoys, they toured main intersections and other potential rallying points, training automatic weapons on unarmed civilians trying to organize demonstrations. […]
The New York Times – The recent surge in student protests, like those that have recently taken place at Yale and Princeton, is not a uniquely American phenomenon. In a new piece, past Fellow Eve Fairbanks writes about the student protest movement globally, with particular focus on South Africa. Fairbanks describes how dissatisfied South African college students […]
Guaymas, Mexico, is an industrial and shrimp-fishing port in the desert state of Sonora. Giant cargo ships nose past steep, uninhabited islands in the bay crowded with saguaro cacti. Every morning for the past month I have lived here, Guaymas has held two certainties: the shriek of an Osprey that patrols the harbor waters, and […]
Summary America’s migrant crisis is far from over. Faced with an influx of tens of thousands of women and children from Central America who overwhelmed US border and immigration agencies in 2014, the United States made several significant policy changes aimed at stemming the flow of people. Although they appear to have eased the immediate […]
Last week, 195 nations meet in Paris to decide the fate of the systems that support life on earth. Again. Since 1995, a majority of the world’s countries has met every year but failed to reach a lasting agreement to figure out what to do about the warming planet. This annual event, which weighs heavier […]
October 1, 2015 Three hours before the train to Ouagadougou was scheduled to leave, the station in Treichville, in southern Abidjan, the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire, hummed with more activity than it had seen in days. Across from the crowd control barriers, ticket-holders sipped Nescafé on a concrete ledge, shielding their faces from the […]
“At night, it looked like another city,” Isabel tells me as she gestures out her office window toward the sea. “There were hundreds of lights. But now, what do you see?” she asks me. “Nada,” I reply. Isabel Soto Gonzalez runs the daily operations at the marina in Santa Rosalía. She tells me that the […]