alice y. su

Page CXVI Blog: Joy

Sun, 19 May 2013 00:52:31 -0400

When I first wrote, or I should say re-wrote, “Joy” I had no idea the
wave it would make. I have received countless emails, questions, and
comments on this one song, several with the similar theme of “she sure
does not sound joyful to me!” I’ve even had people tell me that they
…

ellisliang: futurejournalismproject: Watergate: The Video...

Mon, 06 May 2013 17:59:59 -0400

ellisliang:

futurejournalismproject:

Watergate: The Video Game

mediareporter:

Journalists: It’s the game you’ve always wanted to play. Forget finding Carmen Sandiego. In Watergate: The Video Game, you’re on the hunt to expose Richard Nixon’s corruption. Here, the real sleuthing happens through interviews, document acquisition and hard-hitting reporting. This is the best way to celebrate the Pulitzer Prize that the Washington Post received 40 years ago today for its coverage of the Watergate scandal.

FJP: I like the 8-bit glory of it all. — Michael

NO WAY. This is too good.

"And yet Slahi’s writing is much more than a litany of abuses. It is driven by something much deeper:..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 16:57:39 -0400

“And yet Slahi’s writing is much more than a litany of abuses. It is driven by something much deeper: not just the desire to “be fair,” as he puts it, but to understand his guards, his interrogators, and his fellow detainees as protagonists in their own right, and to show that even the most dehumanizing situations are composed of individual, and at times harrowingly intimate, human exchanges. The result is an account that is both damning and redeeming.”

- intro to slate’s 3-part series of excerpts from a guantanamo detainee’s memoirs. just click through, click this and read it now

"Twitter may not be something you want to be good at, but being good at twitter means being as much..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 16:19:00 -0400

“Twitter may not be something you want to be good at, but being good at twitter means being as much like a sixteen year old as possible. Adulthood is about closing down, about keeping things to yourself, building defenses, maintaining dignity, putting a polite face over impolite reactions. Adolescence lacks these filters. It is still about tantrums and obliviousness. People are far more interesting before they have figured out that in the grand scale of things nothing that happens to any of us is all that important.”

- helena fitzgerald on twitter and #followateen in the new inquiry

"Your days are short here; this is the last of your springs. And now in the serenity and quiet of..."

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:55:34 -0400

“Your days are short here; this is the last of your springs. And now in the serenity and quiet of this lovely place, touch the depths of truth, feel the hem of Heaven. You will go away with old, good friends. And don’t forget when you leave why you came.”

- Adlai Stevenson, Class Day address to the Class of 1958

futurejournalismproject: Twitter Diplomacy Last week Egypt...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 11:40:58 -0400

futurejournalismproject:

Twitter Diplomacy

Last week Egypt issued an arrest warrant for the comedian Bassem Youssef for insulting Islam and the country’s President, Mohamed Morsi.

Jon Stewart, to whom Youssef is often compared, spent 10 minutes on his show Monday defending Youssef, talking about free speech and satire, and generally roasting Morsi.

Yesterday, someone at the US Embassy in Cairo sent out a link to The Daily Show clip.

Morsi’s office is not amused. Details at the New York Times.

Image: Screenshot, Storify by Rami Reda Khanfar capturing the exchange.

Photo

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 09:19:41 -0400

PTL. PTLPTLPTLPTLPTL.

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:49:46 -0400

PTL. PTLPTLPTLPTLPTL.

ARA 107

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:49:00 -0400

I didn’t know Princeton had offices in trailers until I went to see my Arabic professor in his. Tarek Elsayed teaches ARA 107, Intermediate Arabic, a class that is not for the faint of heart.

The first time I went to Tarek’s office hours, I walked fast. I wanted to fit in all my feminine dual conjugation questions within 30 minutes before finishing a paper, grabbing dinner, making a 3-hour dance rehearsal and then working on my thesis until 3 a.m. My Arabic test was at 10 a.m. the next morning, so if Tarek helped me understand the grammar concepts well enough, I could wake up at 8 and review them for an hour or so on the treadmill.

My mental planning paused when I got to the office. I was confused as I approached a trailer behind Dillon gym, far down campus away from the Gothic spires and ivy-trailing towers that Princeton catalogues usually boast.

A metal ramp leads up to the trailer door. Inside, the ceiling lights are a garish white on blank hallways that lead to the Outdoor Action office on one side and a makeshift Arabic department on the other. A clump of dumpsters is less than ten yards away, and stray cats often yowl as they pass by Tarek’s window on their way to dig through the trash.

In the afternoons, Tarek stands outside the trailer, letting out puffs of cigarette smoke and furrowing his tanned Egyptian brow against the cold of a New Jersey winter. He cups a mug of coffee – ahwa, in Egyptian colloquial – in one hand. His wrinkles melt into a grin whenever an Arabic student passes by. “Kayf al-hal, ya taalib? How is your day goin’? Ya salaam, you doin’ OK?”

That day, my shoulders were tense as I dropped into one of Tarek’s chairs. I picked up a wooden camel figurine and tapped it restlessly on the table. “Ustaadh, I don’t understand – OK so, in exercise 10 you said that we add an alif to these words if it’s in majzoom form but then why didn’t you do that in exercise 12 part b? Also what are the cases when you drop the noon in an edaafa construction? I don’t get this chart either what exactly does jussive mean? Can you give me examples also is this going to be on the test and how much vocabulary do you think I can memorize, I’m just really swamped right now, OK but can you help me?”

Tarek looked at me and laughed. “Ya, Aiisha! Alice, relax! We take it one at a time, OK? Don’t confuse yourself, you gonna sink in the ocean like that.

Tarek is a little over fifty, slightly balding, with laugh crinkles around his eyes behind the glasses that are always falling off as he tumbles around the classroom. He doesn’t walk. He bounces, bounds, jumps from student to student with a poke here, a jab there to make sure everyone is listening. The tables are set up in a circle, and sometimes his navy sweaters don’t quite cover his protruding belly as he rolls over the table, slowed for a few moments like a large tortoise stuck on its back, legs in the air as it veers against gravity.

But the next moment he has landed. He is waving and yelling in the middle of the room, acting out vocabulary words in a hurricane of Arabic charades that leaves clouds of chalk dust in his wake. “Inqata’ah! To cut across!” Tarek barks, and leaps from one desk to another, jabbing at an imaginary enemy. “Al-harb! War! Like the Crusades, ya tolaab, my students, you know? Like Salah-i-deen! The great warrior! Ah-thayyem, the Greatest, you remember this superlative form from Chapter 14? Wake up ya Waseem, you gonna sink in the ocean.”

Arabic is an eloquent language. It prizes overwrought sentences, trains of subjects and predicates loading in back-and-forth referential order, an adjective three lines down in the paragraph modifying a metaphor introduced two breaths ago, so that you forget what the sentence was about before you even finish reading, but drag it on like the opposite of clear English writing, because it’s Arabic, it’s Eastern, it’s a wholly Other culture and in sentences here quality correlates to quantity, the longer the better, in terms of terms, complexity is good.

Without Tarek, ARA 107 students would be lost. A sense of camaraderie bonds all Arabic students on campus, even if they haven’t had a course together. “Are you in 107? Have you had Tarek?” A knowing smile passes between them when they run into each other, “I know, hamdullilah. Thanks be to God, right?”

Tarek doesn’t teach – he leads. Arabic is not a class. It’s a battle that Tarek spearheads, charging at the forefront of a motley Princetonian crew, wielding laughter as his weapon against the foe of linguistic confusion. On his turf, Arabic is a game and the prize is knowledge picked up in a fit of hilarity. “Come on, make my day,” he puffs out his chest, clapping and stomping at the front of the classroom. “Ya salaam!” he spins and shimmies when someone answers a question correctly, and throws a penny at him or her. “Go buy yourself some coffee.” On the last day of class, he buys coffee and pastries for everyone anyway.

Many who haven’t passed through Tarek’s ranks just give up on Arabic. “All we did was case endings every single day,” says Sean Webb, a sophomore who took 107 with another professor. “It was death.”

Princeton has a grade deflation policy that exacerbates the already type-A students’ proclivity for stress. Only the top 35% of students in any class are allowed to get A’s. In a language class of less than 10 students, that means a 95% perfect work record could still be a B. Combine this pressure with Arabic’s inherently grammatical demands, and you get a group of overachieving kids constantly on the verge of stress explosion.

In Tarek’s office, though, the Princeton drive slows down. On my first visit, I didn’t realize that I was out of breath until Tarek told me to breathe.

“Relax, ya Alice,” Tarek said. “You Princeton students are too serious. Don’t worry about the test, ya salaam, you know education is about learning, not about your As and Bs and Cs, ya ni? It’s not gonna be the end of the world if you get a B, you know?”

Tarek’s capacity to laugh at life comes from his own experience. Before Princeton, he was once a soccer player. Born and raised in Cairo, he spent his youth on the soccer fields with Al-Ahly, one of the two premier Egyptian clubs. “In Cairo University, I didn’t even know where the library was,” Tarek says. He was set for a professional athletic career until he injured his knee. No more soccer stardom. Tarek was sad for years.

“Sometimes you don’t know what’s going to happen to you,” he says. “Your life takes a long turn. Instead of being an actor, you’re a garbage man. Instead of a soccer player, you’re an intellectual.”

Tarek’s once-athletic physique has diminished – or rather, expanded. But his energy is the same. “Atlob al-aalm mithl al-maa. Seek knowledge like water,” he sighs. He left Cairo after his injury to study history in Germany for 3 years. Then came an M.A. in Islamic history at Rutgers University, a doctorate at St. Andrew’s in Scotland and a teaching career first there, then Oxford and now Princeton.

When I go to Egypt for research later in the semester, Tarek asks me to bring back twelve hardcover books on the history of the Crusades. My luggage is overweight, but he is so happy when I bring the books that he breaks out into song. “Yaaa habibatiiiii…”

Back in Tarek’s office on that first day, he answers my questions and reviews the exercises. Then we talk about orientalism, visiting the Middle East and all our favorite foods there. I end up staying 20 minutes longer than intended, but it doesn’t matter. I walk out with a smile.

Tarek coined his “sink in the ocean” phrase three years ago. He chose to use it in English deliberately because he knew it would sound stranger that way. “It makes you laugh,” he says. “That’s one of the ways to make students feel the comfortable, to have a sense of humor in the class. If you’re not at ease, you not gonna learn, no matter how smart you are.”

Once, Tarek mentioned feeling embarrassed about his office when friends from Egypt came to visit. “Princeton University, this prestigious college, you know, the Ivy League, it’s the top school in the world. But I only show them my office very quickly.”

No matter. Tarek is beloved and his trailer is remote, but warm. By the end of the semester, it has become my favorite place to learn.

On any given day, current and former students are in the trailer joking in aamiyah, colloquial or fusha, classical Arabic, about smoking and going to Starbucks and sinking in the ocean. Tarek goes over preposition rules, and then they talk about Egypt and he gets a faraway look in his eyes. Many of his students plan to go on Arabic summer programs, and he tells them how they’ll eat koshari and roasted pigeons and kebabs, and see the souks and mosques and beautiful Masr of his youth. They’ll love Cairo. They’ll love his people. Here’s his best friend’s phone number. They should call him and say they’re students of Tarek. They’ll be welcomed and treated like kings and queens.

I take my test the next day. It’s hard, and I don’t get an A on it. But I don’t mind. At 10:49, Tarek collects our exams and bellows, “Ayna al-wajibaat? Where is the home works?” We all laugh on their way out of the room. “Ma salaama, ya ustaadh.” Peace be with you, until we fight again tomorrow.

quick adviser meeting

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 00:52:38 -0400

alice: how was egypt?
DK: you know those cartoons where the character is running extremely fast, and then he goes over a cliff?
alice: ah.....
DK: that's the state. financially, politically, everything. and everyone i talked to just expected that the world would catch them. that someone would stop them before going over the cliff, or prevent them from falling.
alice: good Lord. and i'm going there in 3 months!
DK: so, how's your thesis?
alice: better than that. haah

"More recently, both Korea (“Kimchi Diplomacy”) and Taiwan (“Dim Sum..."

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:32:01 -0400

“

More recently, both Korea (“Kimchi Diplomacy”) and Taiwan (“Dim Sum Diplomacy”) have been engaging in culinary diplomacy to help increase global recognition of their respective nation brands.

——

Real public diplomacy towards America doesn’t exist solely on the coasts but also very much in America’s heartland. Korea would be wise to introduce Korean barbecue across the hills and plains of America. Carry out Korean culinary diplomacy to Texas to introduce Korean barbecue to Texas cowboys. Or for that matter, promote Korean barbecue to Kansas City, to Memphis and the Carolinas to challenge for the global barbecue crown.

Meanwhile, Taiwan could market its Taiwanese beef noodle soup, which could easily become the next popular soup dish. With its savory taste and tempting aroma, Taiwanese beef noodle soup could be a very marketable cuisine in the culinary diplomacy department. Having done public diplomacy work in Texas, I can only imagine how much the Lone Star state, or any other state that constitutes cattle-country, would enjoy a hearty bowl of beef noodle soup.

For the wide swathes of Americans who don’t travel abroad, it is through culinary experiences that Americans often discover other parts of the world. Korea and Taiwan’s respective gastrodiplomacy efforts help familiarize the foreign; both campaigns would be wise to broaden their culinary diplomacy outreach to America’s heartland.

”

- paul rockower on huffpo

hahahaah. too amusing not to share. i want to work this into my thesis somewhere… somehow. discreetly.

alright, see y’all on april 3rd. p.s. i’ve moved...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:55:00 -0400

alright, see y’all on april 3rd.

p.s. i’ve moved over to my thesis blog where i am posting compulsively as i power through the next month. pw is my netid. basically i just needed somewhere to vent. separated so that i won’t spam people’s feeds with madness… haha

theatlantic: The Frightening Effects of the NYPD’s ‘Mapping...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 13:52:00 -0400

theatlantic:

The Frightening Effects of the NYPD’s ‘Mapping Muslims’ Program

One of the program’s more damaging consequences, the report finds, was its effect on freedom of speech. Public talk of politics and foreign affairs, from the mosque to the barber shop (especially discussion involving the tactics of the city’s police department) has now long been and is still seen as an invitation for scrutiny. A father urged his son not to speak with the Associated Press as the investigation was breaking, for fear of backlash. A cafe owner in Bay Ridge stopped tuning his television to Al-Jazeera, in an effort to avoid NYPD scrutiny. (The tactic was duly noted in an NYPD report on Egyptian cafes [PDF].)

Read more. [Images: Reuters, AP]

futurejournalismproject: Giles Duley...

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:41:41 -0400

futurejournalismproject:

Giles Duley Interview

ifilikeityoulikeit:

*Very interesting interview

“Giles Duley has been getting a lot of attention recently as the photographer who lost both his legs and an arm after stepping on a landmine in Kabul while documenting American troops in Afghanistan. Giles has been reluctant to speak about himself and his accident, but it’s the work that he’s been compiling for ten years that I really wanted to talk to him about.”

Read more

FJP: Definitely read more.

theatlantic: In Focus: A Trip to Iran Amos Chapple is a travel...

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 15:03:38 -0400

theatlantic:

In Focus: A Trip to Iran

Amos Chapple is a travel photographer who made the following pictures over the course of three visits to the Islamic Republic of Iran between December 2011 and January 2013. The New Zealand freelancer said he “was amazed by the difference in western perceptions of the country, and what I saw on the ground… I think because access for journalists is so difficult, people have a skewed image of what Iran is — the regime actually want to portray the country as a cauldron of anti-western sentiment so they syndicate news footage of chanting nutcases which is happily picked up by overseas networks. For ordinary Iranians though, the government is a constant embarrassment. In the time I spent there I never received anything but goodwill and decency, which stands in clear contrast to my experience in other middle eastern countries. I met an American special forces soldier in Kyrgyzstan last year who said when it comes to the Middle East, America has the wrong friends and the wrong enemies.” Below is a selection of Chapple’s recent photographs of Iran, captions provided by the photographer.

Read more. [Images: Amos Chapple]

CLS Arabic 2013

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:43:00 -0500

so it’s official, come june 19th i will be back in cairo, egypt. for june-august at the very least, and we’ll see what happens after that. oh مصر i will see you again SO SOON! what. what what what YES!!!! PTL.

march = THESIS

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:52:00 -0500

way behind. going into beastmode for the next few weeks. this is my jam. shoutout/thanks/loveeee to naacho, my recent fave princeton family :)

flavorpill: Fascinating Photos of Overcrowded Newsstands Around...

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 12:48:03 -0500

flavorpill:

Fascinating Photos of Overcrowded Newsstands Around the World

shortformblog: reportagebygettyimages: Can you imagine A Day...

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 09:50:43 -0500

Remi Ochlik

Marie Colvin

Chris Hondros

Tim Hetherington

shortformblog:

reportagebygettyimages:

Can you imagine A Day Without News?

One year ago, legendary correspondent Marie Colvin and photojournalist Remi Ochlik were killed in Homs, Syria. Evidence from eye witnesses suggests that the journalists were targeted by the Syrian regime in an attempt to limit exposure of the war’s atrocities. Their deaths struck an industry still reeling from a string of tragic losses, including the deaths of photojournalists Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington in Misrata, Libya, in April 2011.

Watch the U.N. Secretary General’s message of support

“It is unacceptable that those looking to report objectively from conflict zones around the world are deliberately singled out, targeted and murdered with impunity, with those responsible for their deaths not facing any repercussions. Without these journalists bearing witness, atrocities committed in war would go unremarked and it is an equal cruelty that their deaths go without justice. This is a situation that has to change. We are heading towards a day when it will be too dangerous for journalists to enter into or report from war zones.” - Aidan Sullivan, Vice President, Photo Assignments, Editorial Partnerships and Development for Getty Images and founder of A Day Without News?

A Day Without News?, launching today, will raise awareness of the risks faced by journalists and photojournalists in war zones, and lobby governments and tribunals to pursue and prosecute those who harm members of the news media. Many media professionals find themselves deliberately targeted when attempting to cover conflicts, and, while it is considered a war crime to do so, there has been little to no enforcement of this international humanitarianlaw. Over the past decade, 945 photojournalists and correspondents have been killed while covering conflict zones, 583 of these without any resulting prosecutions as war crimes. Ninety journalists were killed in 2012 alone, the deadliest year on record.

Please visit A Day Without News? to learn more and to add your name in support.

The people who risked life and limb to tell you about the stories you care about. Learn more about them—along with the risks involved.

newshour: In a month on the frontline, Reuters photographer...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:16:54 -0500

newshour:

In a month on the frontline, Reuters photographer Goran Tomasevic saw the Syrian Rebel fighters in Damascus defend a swath of suburbs in the Syrian capital, mount complex mass attacks, manage logistics, treat their wounded…and die before his eyes.

Click here to see more photos.