Frontier Country: The political culture of logging and development 
on the periphery in Laos

October 10, 2011

In the last few years, an increasing amount of timber has been mined out of the frontier forests of Laos, nearly all of it bound for Vietnam…

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Revealing the Invisible

October 9, 2011

The Hawaiian word ‘mãnoa’means “vast and deep,” and is a literal description of the lush green valley on O‘ahu that is home to a unique bi-annual publication of the same name…

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How to Move a Tree

October 7, 2011

Early one morning in a park in Taiwan I came across a man who had stopped off on his way home from the market to harness himself to a tree…

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Awakening the Goddess Within: An Interview with Mayumi Oda

October 2, 2011

Graphic artist Mayumi Oda’s cultural, spiritual, and artistic odyssey has taken her through many lives, eras, countries, and incarnations…

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Poetry, Love, Enlightenment

October 1, 2011

Eight hundred years ago, in a northeastern town of the Persian kingdom, a boy was born. When he was twelve years old, he chanced to meet the great Sufi master and Persian poet Attar, who told the boy’s father: “The fiery words of this boy will kindle the souls of lovers all over the world.”

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Alone With Your Self: The Hermit Experience

October 1, 2011

Edward A. Burger found his teacher, Master Guangkuan, in the Zhongnan Mountains in the winter of 1999. He completed his first documentary, Amongst White Clouds, about Zhongnan Mountain hermits in 2005…

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All the Times in the World

August 24, 2011

Time…is one of those currencies we exchange every time we cross a border. An hour in Japan (where everything is clockbound, and even televisions show the hour) is equivalent to a day in laid-back India…

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Bright Road

August 20, 2011

In the beginning was the yearning — to seek what could be sought, find what could be found, learn what could be known — to go beyond mountains, know beyond deserts, discover beyond oceans…

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Synthetic Dreams: The Art of Mariko Mori

August 20, 2011

Mariko Mori’s themes are eclectic, embracing the fantasies of post-everything Japan and its extreme experimentation while recontextualizing traditional customs, mannerisms, and trends…

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The Joy of What’s Fleeting

August 13, 2011

The area in which I make my home, doing its best to approximate to the San Fernando Valley, has no temples or shrines or narrow winding streets of the kind, when young, I associated with the “real Japan.“

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The Mystery of Mastery

July 27, 2011

It is not a coincidence that disciples of Zen who have achieved an intuition that is spiritual and transcendental and yet strikes decisively at the very heart of the physical world, are referred to as Masters…

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Along the Silk Road Today

July 23, 2011

We sat in the little space, ringed by snowcaps, under a pulsing moon, 10,000 feet above the sea, and many hours from what the Eagles might consider civilization, and we tried to jolly into being all their songs of hard women in Los Angeles, the dangers of cocaine.

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Keys to the Kingdom

July 21, 2011

As we travel the convoluted pathways of life, asking ourselves the myriad questions that characterize intelligent inquiry, such as “Why am I holding this golf club?”

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Long Knowledge

July 21, 2011

Heading down the winding road this morning under lowering mountain clouds as the sun was just dawning above the lake, its long rays edging sideways into the dark wedge of space beneath the thick clouds, I was perfectly placed to receive the gift of fresh light livening all the dew the night had draped on the mountainside…

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Pico Iyer is Lost

July 7, 2011

Pico Iyer is lost. It’s a condition he uses to great effect in his increasingly internalised travel books as we find him on the road to somewhere he’s not sure of.

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Gay Jakarta: Defining the Emerging Community

July 7, 2011

Watch any television channel in Indonesia for more than half an hour and it’s obvious that waria (male-to-female transvestites) are tolerated throughout the country…

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India’s Bandit Queen: An Interview with Phoolan Devi

July 5, 2011

Astonishing viewers at the Cannes Film Festival, the 1994 film “Bandit Queen” thrust PHOOLAN DEVI into the international limelight. But Devi criticized the film for being overly graphic and for leaving out major events…

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Where is the Wild?

June 29, 2011

Henry was wild about wildness, just couldn’t stop talking about it one way or another, and who can blame him, he saw it disappearing.

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Learning from Pyongyang TV

June 21, 2011

“The thing I like best about Pyongyang TV is no commercials…unless, of course, you understand the programming for what it really is —one long political commercial!”

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Hesitant Laughter in the Land of a Thousand Smiles

June 21, 2011

A duck barks, then croaks, then meows. Students of the Pattana Village School in Bangkok’s Klong Toey slum sit on the concrete floor of the schoolyard to watch the Nithan Caravan puppet show…

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A Princess Ever, an Empress Never?

June 20, 2011

These days, a woman probably has more prospects of flying to the moon than becoming a titled member of one of the few remaining royal families, whose duties are much less glamorous…

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