NikkiSerapio.com

TIME interviews Nick Kristof:

How much of your work is aimed at the average reader and how much are you writing for policymakers?

It’s a bit of both. I want President Obama and Secretary Clinton to read it, but I also think that at the end of the day, leaders don’t tend to truly lead on issues where our values are concerned; they respond to public pressure and public demand. If one could raise the salience of Congo, for example, on the national agenda, then that impels leaders to lead.

Do you think that happened with your writing about Darfur?

I would have loved it if there had been more of a reaction and more pressure put on Sudan. But I also think there are hundreds of thousands of people who are alive in Darfur who wouldn’t be if it hadn’t been for that public movement. It raised the costs to Sudan so that the Sudanese military or the Janjaweed couldn’t attack some of the refugee camps. And it led the UN to feed some of these people and avert starvation. It didn’t work nearly as well as it could have, but it was vastly better than the alternative.

Via Enough:

He is prepared to do the thing that is the hardest for many people in writing. He is prepared to be predictable; he’s prepared to be repetitive. When we look back at the Holocaust, we don’t say to ourselves, ‘Oh, gosh, can you believe so-and-so wrote 20 redundant columns on the extermination of Europe’s Jews?’ If it’s happening every day, it deserves to be written about every day.”

So said Samantha Power, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, in an interview for the new HBO documentary “Reporter.” The film, which will premiere tomorrow evening on HBO, shadows New York Times columnist Nick Kristof on assignments around the world, focusing on his work in eastern Congo.

Interesting food posts on (Ask) Metafilter:
- “What is the best food dish (speciality) out of every culture?”
- A purist’s recipe for an essential tomato spaghetti sauce.
- Another tomato sauce recipe…even simpler than the one above.

Nicholas Kristof’s latest “field Op-Ed” focuses on the ongoing conflict in eastern Congo. Here’s hoping that this piece and others like it spark a new round of Congo activism.

Maybe something’s in the air, but this year has been a great year for new technology.

As a thank you, I want to mention some big tools and tiny tools that have made my life that much better. These recommendations come straight from my techie heart…I’m not being paid to shill for any of the following.

Feedly: A much more effective way to scan and read RSS feeds than Google Reader. The latter is a strong product, and it’s perfect for anyone who prefers firehose lists of information. Feedly, however, offers a fresh take on information design: its unique magazine, digest, and inline formats — combined with its solid filtering and sharing options — should make anyone into a much more nimble feed reader.

(click the image above for a full screenshot)

Spotify: I’ve been able to spend a good amount of time exploring Spotify’s music platform, which provides free, legal, and instant access to an incredible number of streaming music tracks.

The interface of Spotify’s desktop app is absolutely lovely. It’s intuitive and looks sharp, and it never gets in your way while you’re browsing and searching for music and creating playlists.

Much more important, though, is the universe of music that you instantly gain. Services like Rhapsody also offer big and growing selections of music, but the fact that Spotify’s core library is immense, wonderfully diverse, AND free to boot (for now) makes Spotify the best thing to happen to online music delivery in many years. On a random day last month, I was able to listen to both a favorite guilty-pleasure song (which will not be named, but I will say that the singer’s name almost rhymes with “Sadie Baba”) and a number of albums featuring the legendary blues singer and guitarist Mississippi John Hurt.

(click the image above for a full screenshot)

Spotify isn’t publicly available yet in the United States, but once the platform does go live here with its desktop and mobile apps, I’m sure it will be an immediate hit. Also, from a business/startup perspective, I’m willing to make this bet with any of my friends right now: within three years Spotify the company will be acquired outright.

Readability (and Readability 2): Online media outlets have every right to place heavy static and rich media advertising next to their actual content — it’s crunch time for many media companies, and I hope some of them will finally hit upon some home run monetization strategies. Indeed, I pray this happens soon: the day that The New York Times or The Economist ceases to exist will be the day that I huddle in a small corner and cry for many hours.

Anyway. Sometimes I feel compelled to read my news articles in a dead-simple format. Just the text. No ads. No breadcrumb navigation. No infographic accoutrements. No sidebars crammed with links. Just give me the text.

Here, printing out your articles would be an environmental no-no. Also, using an ad blocker provides only a partial solution, since it removes some distractions but not others. Finally, even reading printer-friendly pages online leaves something to be desired (more often than not). I’m not surprised anymore whenever a website sneaks an ad or extraneous graphic into its printer-friendly format(s).

Enter Readability and Readability 2 (most of the credit should be given to Arc90, creator of Readability), two JavaScript bookmarklets that transform most news articles and blog posts into pleasant simple text. I’ll let this screenshot do the rest of the talking:

A Mix of Firefox Extensions: I leave you with two screenshots (click the thumbnails for the full images):

Thank you to the following for allowing me to set up this work environment quickly and painlessly.

- Minimalist Gmail
- This script (added via Greasemonkey), which allows me to use an uncluttered Google Docs writing pad
- This add-on, which lightens the visual weight of my navigation bar
- This add-on, which fixes a frustrating bug in Firefox 3.5

***
And of course there is always more tech to celebrate. For me, the value of the above tools is clear. They’re easy to set up and use, and at the same time they help my work flow or else enrich my personal reading/listening/creative life. If you end up trying any of these tools, let me know what you think!

I use Delicious regularly to share bookmarks and my reading notes. If you’re following my public Google Reader page, you’ll probably want to follow these sites instead:

Personal Bookmarks
Sudan Bookmarks

Posted earlier on OurPledge.org:

On September 23, 2009, National Security Council Director Samantha Power briefed the press on a meeting that same day between President Obama and representatives of a number of UN peacekeeping-contributing countries.

Power is arguably best known as the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. The book, incidentally, was and still is a vital guide for the Sudan movement. By meticulously cataloging and analyzing a long history of U.S. political and moral failure, A Problem from Hell reveals what needs to be changed in our country’s strategic and tactical game plans for combating genocide and other mass atrocities.

When President Obama took office, Power put on a new hat. Formally speaking, she is now the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the National Security Council. A perhaps excessively long title, yes, but the practical importance of having this particular person in this particular position should be clear to anyone. Power knows very well the different shades of political expediency, negligence, and wishful thinking that have undermined U.S. approaches to stopping genocide in the past. Accordingly, she can apply (and hopefully already has applied) this encyclopedic knowledge to help create anti-genocide policy instruments, institutions, and norms that actually save and protect lives.

***
Power’s September 23rd Q&A press briefing included this important back-and-forth:

QUESTION: Thank you. My name is Laolu Akande. I work for the Guardian of Nigeria. I just have two really quick questions, specifically on the UNAMID situation in Darfur. For a long while, the generals of the troops there, I believe it was General Agwai, stressed the need that they needed about 18 helicopters. And all through [inaudible] there for about two years, I don’t think they got up to four. Did the President make any commitment to ensure that this kind of situation does not repeat itself?…

MS. POWER: …On the helicopters, you raise an excellent point. And it’s not just the last few years where we’ve had the helicopter Darfur issue. Of course, one only has to go back to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 to remember all of the painstaking effort that was made just to try to get armored personnel carriers to the peacekeepers in Rwanda while the genocide was underway. There are issues of red tape that I think this Administration is committing — it has committed itself and is engaged in trying to cut through. That is in other countries, and of course, as well in our collective effort in every country, we’ve got to cut through the red tape.

And then there is — really the message again that the President delivered today in the General Assembly is how can we get countries — each of us to ask ourselves where can we add value here. Maybe we’re not a country that’s going to send troops to South Sudan or to Haiti or to Liberia — this is any country — but maybe we have helicopters or maybe we have helicopter pilots. And that’s why I closed with the quote that the President gave at the end of his press conference saying respect, support, and thanks, and him saying that we’re going to work bilaterally and multilaterally.

Here, we think Power is absolutely right to connect Darfur and 1994 Rwanda. The international community’s failure (so far) to secure eighteen helicopters for the UN’s struggling Darfur force should draw comparisons to the U.S.’s monumental failures to act materially against the Rwandan genocide. With millions of Darfuris in need of adequate protection right now, there’s simply no excuse for delay, just as there was no excuse to not provide the firepower, interventionist mandate, and troop numbers necessary to stop the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis.

Power states that “we’ve got to cut through the red tape” in regards to Darfur protection issues. As watchful advocates, we should mark this down as a kind of promise on the part of the Obama administration. Securing, deploying, and maintaining eighteen helicopters is no small feat, but in the universe of U.S. military capacity and U.S.-ally military capacity, such a task is infinitely manageable and involves no huge cost. So why not now?

The Sudan movement should continue to press the Obama administration on this and other protection priorities. If A Problem from Hell taught us anything, it’s this: assumptions often breed tragedy. Samantha Power has provided a signal that the U.S. intends to cut through bureaucracy, but we can’t take anything for granted. The building of political will through relentless citizen pressure is what changes words like Power’s into action.

Marshall Ganz provides a good planning framework for activists:

“A good way to get a handle on your [community] organizing project is to “map” it within the social world in which you are organizing by asking four questions: who are the actors, what are their interests, what resources do they need to act on those interests, and where can they get the power to mobilize and deploy those resources on their behalf.”

Seems like it’s time to do some serious research on certain governments’ blocking of social networks and other online organizing tools. From a New York Times article on the recent presidential election and protests in Iran:

“The authorities closed universities in Tehran, blocked cellphone transmissions and access to Facebook and some other websites, and for a second day shut down text-messaging services.”

Looks like Freedom House has already been on the case, though.

Originally published here.

The analytics for my Sudan group’s website provide some reason to hope.

This year, of the top 20 web searches (via Google, etc.) that generated clickthroughs to OurPledge.org, there are three especially eye-catching ones:

- 4th most popular search term: “darfur genocide 2009″
- 12th most popular: “genocide in darfur 2009″
- 17th most popular: “darfur 2009″

I can’t be 100% sure of this, but the above metrics seem to indicate that people still care about what’s happening right now in Western Sudan, whether from an informational or an activist perspective. 2009 marks the seventh year of the Darfur genocide, but by all accounts “compassion fatigue” hasn’t become a blocker for the Sudan movement’s continuing fight.

For sure, a good number of these searches are being done by new “leads” (as opposed to the movement’s existing constituency). But this should count as good news: growing the movement’s base of supporters and enthusiasts is vital to achieving some big advocacy wins (e.g., getting multilateral sanctions imposed on the Sudanese government’s senior leaders, etc.). We’re crossing our fingers that people keep on searching and acting.