At the age of four, Iqbal Masih was sold by his father to the owner of a Pakistani carpet factory for $200. Over the next six years, for as many as 12 hours a day, Iqbal worked the looms and suffered verbal and physical abuse. In 1992, at the age of ten, he attended a […]
On Long Island, New York, in the early 1990s, a new kind of organization started to organize workers that traditional unions largely neglected: undocumented immigrants. These day laborers, housecleaners, and workers at small factories sustained the Long Island economy – as they did so many communities throughout the United States – but had few organizations […]
Focus on the Global South has its offices on the sunny campus of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. Here, academics and activists from around the world strategize on how to level a global playing field that has long tilted in favor of northern countries. In 1995, Philippine intellectual Walden Bello and his co-director from India […]
As a middle-aged woman, she composed ethereal music, painted vivid pictures, and wrote a range of works including plays, poetry, and two learned books on the natural world, one of which included what is probably the first description in the Western tradition of a female orgasm. She founded her own convent, and corresponded with kings […]
They deliberately chose the Colombian savannah, the llanos, because it was so inhospitable. If their experiment in living called Gaviotas could be successful in an area with soil so poor that it was considered practically a desert, then it stood a much better chance of being replicated around the world. In Bogota, in the late […]
Robert Mapplethorpe started out as a painter, taking Polaroid pictures only with the intention of incorporating them into his artwork. Gradually, as he awakened to the potential of the medium, he began to document the world around him, particularly the art world, and the world of sex. Many of his photographs from the 1970s […]
First it challenged the vaunted benefits of genetically modified food. Now it’s focusing on the next questionable application of science to the food chain: nanotechnology. The North America-based ETC Group (Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration) came to prominence in the late 1990s when it decried agribusiness giant Monsanto’s marketing of the “Terminator” gene […]
She has been called the world’s most famous political prisoner. With her small stature, calm demeanor, and unflinching calls for democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi has become a symbol of international human rights. She has led the opposition movement in Burma (officially known as Myanmar) since she returned to the country in 1988. The military […]
In the short but cunningly constructed imaginative work The Lives of Animals, protagonist Elizabeth Costello is about to give a lecture at fictional Appleton College. A novelist herself and an advocate for animal rights, Costello is, in her own words, “an old woman” who no longer has the time “to say things I do not […]
The Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, approach justice a little differently. The Western legal system has gradually refined an approach to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused and then mete out punishment for the guilty. The Maori approach, a version of restorative justice, focuses instead on the victims. Rather than simply […]