Aside

I had the honor of being interviewed (again!) by Jesse Brown on his CBC show, “Search Engine“, to talk about Iranian blogging and to provide an update on the Hossein Derakhshan situation. You can download the podcast, once Toronto wakes up, here. Update (6:34 am Pacific): Here’s the permalink. I had no idea I was Search Engine’s Senior Unpaid Iranian Affairs Correspondent. Sweet!

My bodaciously brilliant fiancée, Rebecca Guyon, is back with two newly-published poems in Strange Machine, an online poetry journal: Cull Canyon A girl drowned here one summer, and another the summer after that. This never stopped anyone from jumping in the water, murky as it was, murky, like most made things. We liked to think the bodies were never found, that if we touched the bottom we ran the risk of brushing their saturated skin. Once, instead of swimming, we…

With Obama in the White House, France is hoping to have a much better relationship — at least culturally and culinarily — with the US. However, shortly before leaving office, the Bush Administration approved a 100 percent import duty on a bunch of EU items. France is upset because one of its main cheeses, roquefort, is being hit with a 300 percent tariff. Many read this as one of the Bush Administration’s flipping the bird against France, who still have…

Los Angeles Times, January 21 2009: Is this the end of Two Buck Chuck? A proposal to raise the state tax on wine to a level more than six times higher to help close California’s giant budget deficit would kill the $1.99 price for Charles Shaw wine, said Fred Franzia, who created the famous label sold by the Trader Joe’s grocery chain. Charles Shaw, of course, is the formal name for the California wines sold since 2002 that are now…

The New York Times, January 21 2009: For well over two centuries, the United States has been vastly more diverse than its ruling families. Now the Obama family has flipped that around, with a Technicolor cast that looks almost nothing like their overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Protestant predecessors in the role. The family that produced Barack and Michelle Obama is black and white and Asian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. They speak English; Indonesian; French; Cantonese; German; Hebrew; African languages including Swahili,…

The New York Times Magazine has a great online feature called Obama’s People, showing pictures of some of the members of the new administration and his allies in Congress. There’s a slideshow and some narration by Narav Kander (photographer), and Kathy Ryan, the Times Magazine’s director of photography. Basically, the idea was to get them photographed in a small, confined space and to let their gestures to the talking. Also, they asked each person to bring (if they wanted?) a…

Dear Friends, I’ve been informed that my radio piece on the launch of the new BBC Persian television service is airing today. It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams): New York – 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 –…

My brilliant and beautiful fiancée, Rebecca Guyon, has just been published (twice!) in the latest issue of Press 1, an online poetry journal. Here’s my favorite of these two: Brocaded Your bready eyes would float if I threw you in this pond. The koi circling, sucking you in with tunnel mouths. Who will touch me then? The garden heaves us onto a screen – remember that little Japanese painting? The clawing wave, the mountain under grip men rowing and sliding…

The Washington Post, January 14 2009, by Bob Woodward: The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a “life-threatening condition.” “We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first…