Am I the last person to find out about this? I caught this fantastic story on Studio 360 this weekend. Apparently Time covered it back in April. Thanks Gregory Brothers!
Dear Friends,
I’ve been informed that my radio piece on the interplay between botnets, cyberattacks and the legal system is airing today.
It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams):
NYC – 3 pm Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org
Washington, DC – 8 pm Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org
Los Angeles – 12 pm Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg
Boston – 4 pm Eastern – WGBH – 89.7 FM – www.wgbh.org
San Francisco – 2 pm Pacific – KQED – 88.5 FM – www.kqed.org
You can also find it on The World’s site later in the day and on my site if you miss the broadcast.
Also, don’t forget about The World’s Tech Podcast, hosted by my boss, Clark Boyd. It comes out every Friday.
Lemme know if you hear it!
Update: Audio is here.
This week, I’m on Radio New Zealand’s This Way Up.
This Way Up with Simon Morton, is a weekly two-hour radio show broadcast on Radio New Zealand National Saturdays from 12pm-2pm – it explores the things we use and consume.
It’s the same story on San Francisco’s TCHO chocolate that I recently did for NPR, but still, it’s fun to have my voice being bounced around the southern hemisphere.
Any NZ listeners out there? The piece airs Saturday, Midday – 2pm (NZ time, of course)
I’ve announced this in other places, but I don’t think here on the blog. I’ll be teaching a crash course in radio for a few weeks at my alma mater, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism starting next week.
My time there is booking up fast! I arrive in town tomorrow and already have a research day trip to Philadelphia planned as soon as I hit the ground early tomorrow morning, as well as an evening meeting back in Manhattan. I’m also going to visit family two out of the three weekends that I’m there, and hopefully with other friends/colleagues. If you’d like to meet up with me, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Dear Friends,
I’ve been informed that my piece on TCHO chocolate is on Morning Edition today (August 7).
It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams).
New York – 5 am to 9 am Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org
Washington, DC – 5 am to 10 am Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org
Los Angeles – 2 am to 9 am Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg
Boston – 6 am to 9 am Eastern – WGBH – 89.7 FM – www.wgbh.org
San Francisco – 3 am to 9 am Pacific – KQED – 88.5 FM – www.kqed.org
It will also be archived at npr.org and at my site if you miss it.
Lemme know if you hear it!
Update: Audio is here.
Thanks to all who showed up (and participated online!) at BayFF last night to talk tech, Iran and all kinds of other stuff. It was a pleasure to speak with Danny O’Brien again and meet Jacob Appelbaum of Tor for the first time. Thanks also to David Farris, Alex Farivar and Nate Cardozo for coming and supporting me.
Also big ups to Sean Savage (who I’ve written about before, and first met six years ago!) and PariSoMa for organizing this event and making their space available to us.
If I met you last night and I didn’t give you a business card, but you want to contact me, do so here. My email is in the upper right of this page.
Finally, I’m giving away five green wristbands like these:
to the first five people who email me, leave a comment on Facebook, send me a Twitter message or otherwise get in touch with me with the word: #freeiranwrist
Thanks!
Update (8:28 am Pacific): We’re down to four!
Update (10:00 am Pacific): Three left!
Update (12:06 pm Pacific): Two!
Update (10:44 am Pacific, August 5): All gone! Thanks!
Update (10:30 am Pacific): Full video of the event is here and after the jump:
If you can, spare a thought for former Iranian vice president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, who I had the pleasure of meeting in November 2007 here in Oakland, as seen above.
The Associated Press:
BEIRUT (AP) — The wife of a prominent pro-reform Iranian politician said Monday her husband was forced into confessing he helped fuel post-election riots as part of a plot to topple the government and said he appeared drugged days before the trial.
The contention by Fahimeh Mousavinejad came as opposition groups claimed the government’s prosecution of about 100 activists for leading protests of the disputed election results was a propaganda show.
Mousavingejad’s husband, former Vice President Mohammad Abtahi, looked gaunt and disheveled when he confessed in a televised broadcast during the opening session of the mass trial on Saturday.
Mousavinejad said she was under pressure from authorities not to talk about her husband’s trial — or, if she spoke, only to support his confessions. Still, she denounced his testimony as coerced and said he appeared drugged when she saw him two days before the trial.
”No one anywhere in the world would believe the confessions of someone whose lawyer hasn’t seen him even for one moment, or someone who has been in solitary confinement for 45 days,” Mousavinejad, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
The broadcast confessions, plus a warning Sunday that opposition figures who criticize the trial will be prosecuted, were seen as an effort to intimidate the reformist movement led by Mir Hossein Mousavi, who claims to be the rightful winner of the election. The claim that the confessions were staged also undermined the credibility of the trials.
I just penned this for PBS’ MediaShift:
by Cyrus Farivar, August 3, 2009
A couple of years ago, while browsing in a Philadelphia bookstore, I found a small red hardback book. Its worn woven cover was used, but in decent condition. The side of the book, in a matching faded red background, had a small vaguely Islamic curved label that reads in gold lettering: Mission for my Country / His Imperial Majesty Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi Shahanshah of Iran.
This was the Shah’s autobiography, published by Hutchinson & Co. in London, in 1960. I happily paid $10 for it and took it home. But I never read it. It was a curiosity more than anything. Plus, the color photo of the Shah on the title page, dressed in a light gray suit with a red tie, reminded me of one of my great uncles. His dark bushy eyebrows framed his eyes that stare squarely back off the page, while his black and gray hair still showed echoes of his youth at the age of 41.
The opening line of the book, which I’ve read many times, verges on the ridiculous:
I still clearly remember an incident when, as a young Crown Prince, I was at school in Switzerland. Our milkman asked me one day which I came from, and when I told him Persia, he said: “Oh yes, I have heard of Persia. That’s in America!”
I love that in a single sentence, Pahlavi manages to evoke two lofty images at once — that he was a “Crown Prince,” and Switzerland, a safe, quiet Alpine country where international royalty stow away their cash and their children. But as silly as this episode may seem now, the Shah, as a Crown Prince, was helping to foment the beginnings of Iran’s reputation in Europe and North America: he was one of many Iranians who were initially educated in Europe — especially France and neighboring francophone Switzerland.
The Shah himself is part of an unacknowledged groundwork of reputation that has been laid between the West and Iran. And it’s precisely for this reason that many Iranians and non-Iranians in America today are so compelled by what’s going on in Iran in a way that would be unlikely if such post-election turmoil was going on in another country in the region. We’ve been primed.
For the record, I *love* to cook, as evidenced by the photo above. Just made some flippin’ fantastic pizza last night, too. Still, this article is pretty thought-provoking. -CF
Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch
by Michael Pollan
The New York Times Magazine
August 2, 2009
But here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.
That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances in technology that made it easier for them to do so. Cooking is no longer obligatory, and for many people, women especially, that has been a blessing. But perhaps a mixed blessing, to judge by the culture’s continuing, if not deepening, fascination with the subject. It has been easier for us to give up cooking than it has been to give up talking about it — and watching it.
Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.
