There have been huge advancements in communication (defined as means of connection between people or places) in this digital age, has there not? But I argue, despite the optimized ratio of content over volume, not much has changed in the last 2 hundred years.

A brief history of communication/transportation of...

Vacant businesses and boarded-up shops line St. Claude Avenue in New Orleans. Letters CARPETS are fadedly spelled onto brick-walled structures; now a painted sign reads St. Bernard Barbershop. No doubt the family lives in back. On the corner, two black boys of sixteen or so hang their heads outbound, waiting...

When I was a girl, my family took an annual seven-hour car trip to Montreal to visit my grandfather. Within 20 minutes, boredom set in and I would commit to reading every road sign that passed. Some towns were named after common words like West Point or Highland Mills. Others...

I got the iPhone. I was going to wait for the next generation too, but I just couldn't help myself. I did it because I can. I can grab a cup of coffee for a buck and read the newspaper in Central Park before work, on my iPhone. I can...

Inside this shiny new digital culture, we are still developing socially acceptable parameters, technetiquette, around modern communication. Phones are suitable for long distance intimate conversations, although webcams are preferred. Emails are instrumental in business and day-to-day contact with family and friends. Text messaging is convenient for organizing impromtu get-togethers. We...

There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars!

-Network

In October's issue of...

Zambia is just a memory, and I struggle to keep each child's smile sharp in my mind. I remember the welcoming darkness of night and reveling in my morning basin bath below the rising sun. I can still taste the honey and roasted groundnuts that we collected ourselves. I hear...

Before my trip to Zambia, I was told that I had more to learn from the orphans than they could learn from me; I realize this now. At Children's Town they eat until satisfied, not until full. They sleep when they are tired. They express themselves without censorship and show...

The Matron's house is settled towards the back of the Children's Town compound: beyond the quartz-stoned entrance gate, past the middle grade classrooms and the school bell, through the thatch-fenced kitchen with stoves of boiling rep cabbage and onions, and just by a garden of herbs. Nestled in a small...

I am dancing the Electric Slide at a Zambian wedding. At this moment, I'm embraced by fate itself. What other explanation could suffice?

Twenty hours on a plane, across the world and over the equator, scared me to death. I would be left to my own devices for a stationary...

I first visited Africa when I was 12 years old. My parents took my brothers and I on a five-star safari through the Serengeti National Park in Kenya and Tanzania. Being our Christmas break and their rainy season, the vacation meant afternoon-long detours around endlessly muddied terrain. My mother and...