What is a revolution? If you ask Charif Kiwan, the exiled Syrian and one of three named members of Abounaddara, he would answer that, in the case of Syria, it is a demand for dignity. Abounadarra is an anonymous […]
Is access to clean water a basic human right? The customary response for most people is yes, of course, but still an estimated 1.4 billion people currently lack access to safe drinking water. And this is just one of the […]
Following the announcement on March 4, 2013, that an 18-month old child in Mississippi had been cured of HIV with an early and rigorous regimen of anti-retroviral drugs, HIV/AIDS is briefly back in headlines in the U.S. Amid the flurry of excitement […]
Argo, a suspenseful tale portraying America’s favorite bad guys, Iranians, as angry gun-toting religio-fascists, just won the Best Picture Academy Award for 2012. Ben Affleck’s directing is better than his acting, but this was not a character driven movie—it was […]
Inspired by the upcoming Academy Awards, the New Context staff is reviewing international films. “5 Broken Cameras” is nominated for the Oscar in the Documentary Feature category.
Balkans International Field Program students attended a book tour event for The Whistleblower at picturesque Columbia University’s Pulitzer Hall January 31. Subtitled “peacekeeping and human-trafficking in Bosnia,” the event revealed how the United Nations and multinational contractor DynCorp were implicated […]
On November 24, 2012, I attended a screening of lauded documentarian Ken Burns’s latest, The Central Park Five. The film recounts the story of five black teenaged boys falsely accused of beating and sexually assaulting a white female jogger in […]
