I’m at the Firelight OSI Transmedia Seminar today, pitching my doc about the housing foreclosure crisis and how it has affected tenanted apartment building in New York City. The film follows a group of tenants in Hunts Point who are trying to take back their building after it goes into foreclosure. You can see more on whenthewallscavein.jux.com
Today I watched them hand out the Pulitzer Prize in the world room. I thought about the first time I came to Columbia, a year ago, and watched them hand out the prizes. I remember back then a feeling of awe - here I was, standing before history.
Watching them handed out today, it felt mostly like a spectacle. An opportunity to shine a light on the Journalism school, perfectly timed to impress potential candidates for the incoming class of 2013. Sure, the Pulitzers are important. But they’re also a little predictable and self congratulatory, awarded by a panel of elites. The Oscars of Journalism.
Maybe journalism school has worked. I’ve finally become the jaded cynic I always hoped not to be.
Azucena and Angelica were born beautiful. The doctors sent them home with their mother when they were three days old. They were the picture of health.
Days later, during a feeding, milk squirted, first from Azucena’s and then from Angelica’s nose.
A cleft palate occurs when the roof of the mouth fails to form, leaving a hole. It makes eating, drinking and speaking difficult. Structurally speaking, cleft palates and lips are simple to repair. But in Guatemala the procedure is not covered by the government. People can wait a lifetime and never have the surgery.
Cleft palates are partially genetic. If you have a sibling with cleft, you are more likely to have a child with a cleft. If you have a distant relative, not so much. Azucena and Angelica are identical twins. They were born with identical clefts.
Today, they have identical repairs.
Sometimes, when life gets tough, what we really need is mom.
I spent Santa Semana in Antigua flanked by volcanoes and men dressed in purple robes. I’m on assignment in Guatemala City this week, working with Operation Smile on a speech rehabilitation project. More on that to follow.
One of those rhetorical moments where I find myself wandering hopelessly through the rain, somewhere in the south bronx, searching for people to interview, and instead a lone rooster decides to cross the road. Only in New York.
Rewards for Justice
I found this while researching the Diversity Visa Lottery Program. It’s like America’s Most Wanted - International Edition. What I want to know is what happens to the families that volunteer the information. Are they living like kings? Or living in hiding…
The Celebrity Effect: Africa Edition
Great data visualization on the hollywood elite and their destination ‘do good’ vacations in this month’s Mother Jones. Not to be missed.
When men were men.
From 1909 to 1912 Russian Photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire, supported by Tsar Nikolas II. The pictures were taken in black and white, but three at a time in rapid succession with a red, a blue and a green filter, which allowed them to be combined into colour images later.
Found here.
Ghana star Asamoah Gyan has quit international football "indefinitely"
I love Gyan. I was hoping for a win against Uruguay in 2010. But damn am I glad he didn’t pull out the Black Star stops last weekend. Chipolopolo 4 lyfe.
Ghana star Asamoah Gyan has quit international football “indefinitely”.
The move follows the Black Stars’ semi-final defeat by Zambia at the Africa Cup of Nations, in which Gyan had a penalty saved.
The player has come under sustained criticism following the Black Stars’ failure to win the continental crown.
Gyan’s decision was confirmed his manager but the country’s football association (GFA) says it is in talks to try and get him to change his mind.
The GFA statement described his move as being a “temporary break” and said it came because the player was “frustrated over the verbal abuse he has received” since the end of the Nations Cup.
Ghana face a number of crucial international matches in the near future - with 2014 World Cup qualifying beginning in June.
Amongst the teams in Ghana’s group in the race to Brazil are the newly-crowned African champions, Zambia.
They will also face a two-legged tie in September and October for a place in the finals of the 2013 Nations Cup in South Africa.
Gyan’s failure to score from the spot echoed the World Cup quarter-final in 2010, when he hit the cross-bar with a penalty in the final moments of extra-time.
Had he scored, Ghana would have almost certainly have gone through to the semis.
Instead they lost the subsequent shoot-out to Uruguay.
Gyan is currently on loan from English Premier League side Sunderland to the UAE-based team Al Ain.
