Higgins's own photo of his interview with Channel 4 news

There aren't just citizen journalists now, sending out YouTube clips to the world. Where Syria is concerned, there are now citizen analysts, scouring that footage for weapons tracking. One of them, Eliot Higgins, is...

"What's Sex Got To Do With It" by Jody Joldersma, reprinted here with her permission

Today was bright white, as I've come to appreciate about Seattle. I feared dark days. Instead, the ocean near the Paccar Pavilion was lit up by...

Valentine's Day is upon us, and those little candy hearts pervasively sugaring the public sphere with the words "Be Mine!" got me thinking recently about the possessive language we use to describe love.

I first belonged to Teresa.

I was sixteen the first summer I observed her clinic in...

"To begin with, the context in which we operate has shifted." -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in the introduction to USAID's 2012 "Frontiers in Development" publication

In order to illuminate the contemporary conversation about foreign aid and policy we're going to have to talk for...

Ahem. A word about the blog I started in college called Cliterati.

(Yep. "Clit" meets "literati." See what my twenty-year-old self did there? If I hadn't been a librarian at the Women's Center in college, I'd say I should've been.)

As I blog I wonder every so often if...

The incredible response to Anne-Marie Slaughter's landmark cover story "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" (easily a hundred articles and blog posts, hundreds of thousands of shares on facebook, broken readership records at The Atlantic) serves as a cultural litmus test for issues ripe for debate. Slaughter...

Two main misconceptions have cropped up in the buzz around Anne-Marie Slaughter's current cover story in The Atlantic, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All." One is that Slaughter imagines herself to be speaking for women other than those in her demographic, when she explicitly states otherwise. The...

I caught a piece of BBC TV news about Michelle Obama one hot afternoon in Nairobi last summer. I was standing on the balcony beside some orange-blossomed flame tulip trees, thinking about the group of young Congolese refugee girls I was working with, when my first lady's voice brought me...

I teach an extract of John Berger's 1972 "Ways of Seeing" to undergraduate composition students. Berger's claim that "men act and women appear," a seemingly antiquated notion, is always fodder for lively debate, along with his suggestion that women fashion their social presence such that others treat them...

I took one introductory international relations class my freshman year of college. It was painfully dry; I spent lectures slouching in back, admiring my combat boots and writing bad poetry. After that one foray into the formal study of international relations, fully half of the rest of my literary arts...

When I visit my childhood home in California, I often postulate to my schoolteacher mother while standing in the bathroom doorway as she brushes her teeth. (I talk a lot; it's one of the only times I can corner her into listening.)

About five years back, my big idea...

"Neither peace nor war happen by accident."

Madeleine Albright said it at her lecture here in Bloomington, Indiana a few months ago. It was a succinct and eloquent nod to the power of intentionality, and she uttered it at the outset of election-campaign season in American politics, a...

The first issue of the comic ElfQuest, written in 1978, depicts a kidnapped elf called Redlance. Elves can "send" thoughts telepathically to other elves within "sending range." The captured Redlance is saved because his loved ones "send" to one another, collaborating to ambush and free him -- without...

"Maybe it's an émigré thing," Russian-born Mikhail Iossel laughs on the phone from his office at Concordia University in Montreal, where he is a professor. "Once uprooted, you just keep rolling."

It was in Boston's Copley Hotel, shortly after his arrival in the U.S., that Iossel realized how deep his...

Last September I was in Turkey for the second-ever Writers and Literary Translators International Congress. Keynote Speaker Maureen Freely, who translates Orhan Pamuk's books, said during her address that translating is much the same as writing novels, which she also writes, and articles, which she writes as well. "You have...

This summer I mobilized the Survival Girls, a theater group for refugee girls from Congo in a Nairobi slum, and witnessed the profound power of healing a space designated "girls only" gave to them. Thing is, as a writer, I obsess probably too much about words. And I -- the...

My first day at Nairobi's UNHCR compound this summer, I was working at a computer when a woman's scream tore into the air. I froze; I had come to work with refugee girls through the UNHCR, but I wasn't an official employee. I looked out the window. Where were the...

The last time I wrote on the Huffington Post about Kenya I was starting a youth empowerment effort, the nature of which was rather vague. I did know that I was in Nairobi with the operational support of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and that of the

Jon Stewart came to Indiana for my birthday. Well, okay, on my birthday. When I was a college freshman in 2002, we used to gather in the basement of our dorm, next to the laundry machines, on smelly, ramshackle couches to watch The Daily Show. Those were the halcyon...

I arrived in Africa in the middle of the night a couple of days ago, but I don't know exactly why. I do know that I am affiliated with The Great Globe Foundation, a theater arts organization that brings workshops to youth in the world's largest refugee camp,...