Theme: Asia
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I remember the day as if it were yesterday, the day I first followed Nancy half way around the world. It was July 22, 1994. I had been 59 years old for just 15 days.Read more
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The region of Zomia had not been mapped for very long when people started quarreling over it. Political scientists, historians, geographers, anthropologists, and especially Southeast Asianists. Even a few anarchists weighed in.Read more
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Pioneering surgeon Susan Lim performed the first liver transplant in Asia. But a moral concern with transplants (where do donor livers come from ...) led her to look furtherRead more
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When she met her husband he was a veterinarian. They lived a simple life in their small town by the lake. He would walk to work in his clogs and scrubsRead more
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The United States at midcentury was in many ways ideally suited to produce the ideology behind agricultural modernization. As Cullather recounts in capacious detail, the invention of the edible calorie in the final decade of the nineteenth century—a major breakthrough in American ideas about optimal food production—foretold the coming fundamental shift in the world's relationship with food. Early in the twentieth century, the United States found a willing test case in Mexico. Seeking to deter Communist activity south of the border, the US government supported the Rockefeller Foundation's efforts to design a prototype for comprehensive agricultural reform. Here, cullather argues, America could effectively export its exceptionalist vision of democracy sustained through technological advance, inventing new "optimal" measures for population and resource scarcity. Read more
