Featured Stories

A few decades back, Isaiah Berlin, one of the great pragmatic philosophers of the 20th Century, wrote an essay entitled “The Hedgehog and The Fox.” The title comes from a poem by Archilochus, written in the 7th Century, B.C.E. in which the ancient fabler noted, “The Fox knows many things, but the Hedgehog knows one… »

If you were in Guatemala on June 28th of this year, you likely heard a rather loud bump in the night coming from our South Eastern border. That evening the Honduran President, Manuel Zelaya, was rousted from his bedchambers, still in his jammies, and hustled off to Costa Rica on a one-way flight, courtesy of… »

One of the most notable characteristics of 21st century Havana is what is not there: obvious and visible destitution. The begging and aggressive peddling prevalent in so many poor Latin capitals (and in most US cities) is entirely absent in Havana. There are no homeless people sleeping under bridges or hidden in doorways, no stumbling… »

The Misfits’ Club

Back in the late 1990s, when I was teaching in Brooklyn, NY, I had a student named Uran Dragon Kolenovic. And, it seemed that the dragon lived inside Uran’s head.

Uran Kolenovic was a 14-year-old immigrant from Kosovo whose mother and father had sent him to America to live with his grandmother when he… »

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and the engine of job creation. – Ronald Reagan

I never met a small businessman yet who didn’t have one finger up his ass and the other on the scales. - Mad Dog Howard

Like many older married men, I’d rather… »

The farmers said they left the building feeling dejected. Their application for a coffee export license had been denied by Anacafé a third time. The process started about six months before when Jorge, not a coffee farmer himself but a resourceful man who had offered to help, went to the Anacafé office to learn what… »

When Glamis Gold began constructing its $254 million open-pit gold and silver mine in Guatemala’s Western Highlands in 2004, the company promised residents in the Department of San Marcos jobs, schools and other social projects, in exchange for letting it extract precious metals. But a few years later, Elida Lopez Tojil, a lifelong resident of… »

… »

When Venezuelans amassed in the streets of Caracas and loyal military units faced down rogue superiors in April of 2002, they may have symbolically ended more than just the coup d’etat against their republic’s constitutional government. Though conflated by Western media as an internal conflict spurred by the precipitous, firebrand ways of president Hugo Chávez,… »

A short time ago Barack Obama, aspiring Democratic candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America, ran into some problems with the nuts on the “Fair and Balanced” right wing of American cable news. It seems that the preacher at Obama’s house of worship, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, has… »