The people most affected by the explosion of Reactor Four on the morning of April 26,1986, soon learned that the event known as Chernobyl was predicted by a feature film made seven years earlier. Stalker, by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, explored the limits of our technical power against the backdrop of a mysterious force that can only be approached on foot, by forest “stalkers” who have learned to accept its risky gifts. Today, real stalkers live inside Chernobyl’s official 30-kilometre Exclusion Zone and secretly strip the dead city of its valuables. A film by Donald Weber.

After a lengthy (foreign) absence, contributor Andrew Gregg returns…
I’m not a car guy so when my friends who are car guys started going on about BBC’s program Top Gear, I didn’t pay much attention. And then I was on a British Airways flight and I watched an entire season of Top Gear on the telly. [...]

If social media tools are enabling the opposition protests in Iran, and helping us outside the country understand what’s transpiring, some credit for this is due to Hossein Derakhshan—Iran’s “Blogfather” and the author of a life that’s taken some very through-the-looking-glass turns of late. Derakhshan is currently being detained by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry.

[Photo: XO Laptop, One Laptop Per Child]
While on the subject of technology and development, I should direct your attentions to a recent post by Jon Evans at his World Fast Forward blog. One of the debates currently raging in development circles has been the relative merits of mobile phones vs. laptops in advancing the economic [...]

[Photo: Christopher Frey]
Technological interventions have often been held up as an almost panacea for meeting development challenges in poor countries. I have two magazine articles now nearing publication, both of them dealing with West Africa’s food security and how it’s being addressed by various competing development strategies. The material also figures in the book, especially [...]

One of the more annoying moments during the first U.S. presidential debate was when the subject of Russia and its recent skirmish with Georgia came up. Both McCain and Obama, without qualification, upbraided big bad Russia as the aggressor, saying NATO and the United States had to be ready to get tough. They allowed no [...]