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This New York Times article about men being raped in the Congo is one of the most unsettling I've read in a long while. This one scene alone should linger in your mind for days:
Tupapo Mukuli ... said he was pinned down on his stomach and gang-raped in his cassava patch seven months ago. Mr. Mukuli is now the lone man in the rape ward at Panzi hospital, which is filled with hundreds of women recovering from rape-related injuries. Many knit clothes and weave baskets to make a little money while their bodies heal.
But Mr. Mukuli is left out.
“I don’t know how to make baskets,” he said. So he spends his days sitting on a bench, by himself.
Writer Jeffrey Gettleman presents a bleak situation, but an acquaintance in the NGO community thinks there may be one small good thing to emerge from publicizing this awful problem. She believes the article "challenges people to think about how they can reach out to male victims of sexual violence, a thing that is so often put off as a 'women's issue.' ... Most NGOs are majority women, and I think that is because women seem to be more aware or interested in solving the very physical wounds of war while men focus on the power dynamics of the conflict at large." She acknowledges that this is a "gross generalization," but it does ring true, and hopefully articles like these have a tangible effect on the NGO community.
Photograph of Congolese soldier by Guyot Pascal/AFP/Getty Images.
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Daniel Edwards—the celebrity-obsessed sculptor who has already blessed the world with Britney Spears giving birth on a bearskin rug and Suri Cruise’s bronzed poop—has just announced his latest work: A statue of Angelina Jolie, enthroned, majestically nude, and suckling a baby at each breast like it ain’t no thang. Weird? Sick? Magnificent? I can’t really tell.
According to the press release, the work—commissioned in honor of World Breastfeeding Week—was inspired by Jolie’s W cover from last November. Though Jolie’s two-handed pose looks awfully precarious to me, apparently she is demonstrating the " ‘football-hold,’ an accepted technique for breastfeeding two babies simultaneously.” Best tidbit:
In recognition of the global effort to encourage breastfeeding, one twin is depicted as being of African descent. Future castings of the statue will represent other world cultures through variations of the babies' patina coloring.
Edwards’ most recent paean to motherhood is the hot pink “String of Babies,” a limited-edition, flexible polyurethane rendition of Nadya Suleman as a baby-bedecked cephalopod.
Photograph of Daniel Edwards discussing his statue of Angelina Jolie courtesy of the sculptor.
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It looks like the war on terror might not reshape just how Americans fight overseas, but also how academics fight in the classroom. Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy has been writing about the influx of vets who served in Iraq and Afghanistan into Middle Eastern studies programs in the United States. Lynch's remarks hint at a fear among some academics that this new wave of presumably pro-government, pro-gun students might shift international studies departments to the right. If there's one thing international types are not prepared to handle, it's conservatives in the academy. (This coming from a girl who went to school in Oklahoma.)
But if they're smart, academics will embrace these "nontraditional students," who will be entering programs with something that's rare (but not unheard of) among career students: actual experience in the countries they are studying. As an international studies major at a school smack-dab in the middle of America, I wasn't exposed to very many students who had lived or worked abroad for more than a semester. (And really, at 19, how many people have been?) As a result, I was always grateful for the voices in classroom discussions of people who had significant international experience—soldiers just back from Afghanistan, Iranian-American women who spent summers in Tehran, Lebanese guys who laughed at my Arabic. They provided far more than homework help, although there was some of that, too: They offered a limited—but authentic—perspective on what life was like in the places we were studying. Sometimes their politics made me cringe, but their stories, arguments, and analyses added depth to our discussions that wouldn't have been there had our conversations been predicated on reading assignments alone.
Civilian institutions—think tanks, congressional committees, universities—need contributors with all sorts of on-the-ground experience, including military service. And as war-making becomes increasingly indistinguishable from nation-building, the military needs well-educated officers who understand the historical, cultural, and political dynamics of the regions they are operating in. The movement of veterans from Kabul to the Kennedy School should be welcomed by academic administrators and military officials alike. Unlike most wars, this is a win-win situation.
Photograph of a soldier in Iraq by David Furst/Getty Images.
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Did anyone who watched Laura Ling and Euna Lee’s arrival in Burbank this morning not cry? Though the reunion of Lee and her daughter, Hannah, was the bigtime tearjerker, for all the obvious, poignant, mommy-daughter-love-runs-deep reasons, there was another quieter moment that had me dripping tears into my cheerios.
After Laura Ling finished embracing her immediate family—husband, sister, mother, father— she walked over to hug Lee’s husband. Her mother, standing behind her, quickly reached over Laura’s shoulder to tuck a wayward strand of hair behind her daughter’s ear. It was such a sweet, impulsive gesture: after all these months, she just can’t keep her hands to herself, so happy to be able to touch her baby whenever she wants. Even more, after all these months, she finally gets to be a mom in the most normal of ways, keeping her daughter’s hair out of her eyes.
Photograph of Laura Ling's and her mother is a still from a video of Ling and Euna Lee's arrival in Los Angeles.
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