BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH In Paraguay, there are 230 Peace Corps volunteers, ma o meno. That group is expected to rise to 300 or so in the coming year as Pres. Obama is pumping a lot more money into the agency as a whole. Peace Corps in Paraguay is also one of the biggest programs in the country – only Ukraine has more volunteers. Within the 230, 49 are in my “G” or training group. We will be working in three different sectors – Health and Sanitation (mine), Early Education, and Urban Youth. The Health and Sanitation group has about […]
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THE PEACE CORPS DIARIES: Letter From Paraguay
EDITOR’S NOTE: Phawker South American Bureau chief St. John Barned-Smith just started a two year hitch in the Peace Corps teaching English in rural Paraguay. BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH Paraguay’s hot. Not deal-breaking hot, but definitely toasty. It’s frequently around 35-38C, which means its frequently in the mid 80s-90s. So how to deal with the heat and humidity? Some genius long ago came up with Terere. Terere is the iced version of Mate. Whenever Paraguayans gather, they end up forming a circle, and passing around the stuff. Here’s how it works: you take a guampa, which holds the yerba. Guampa’s […]
THE PEACE CORPS DIARIES: Letter From Paraguay
EDITOR’S NOTE: Phawker South American Bureau chief St. John Barned-Smith just started a two year hitch in the Peace Corps teaching English in rural Paraguay. BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH Hello everybody. I hope you are all well. This will be my first blog entry since I landed on the ground in Paraguay about three weeks ago. There’s been a lot that happened since then. Lets start at the beginning. I landed in Asuncion with 48 other freaked out and excited American men and women – all young, below the age of 30. There are 24 in my group (including me) […]
OPEN LETTER: Goodbye Philly, Hello Cruel World!
Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978). The Peace Corps (J.F.K.’s Bold Legacy), 1966. Story illustration for Look, June 14, 1966. Oil on canvas. 45 1/2 x 36 1/2 in. (115.6 x 92.7 cm). From the permanent collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum. BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH Well folks, by the time you read this I will be gone. This morning I left the U.S. on a jet plane and began a two-year stretch in the Peace Corps in (very) sunny Paraguay. Although I’m from Boston, I will dearly miss the city of not-always-so-brotherly-love that I have called home for the last two […]
MEDIA: Philly.com’s Chris Krewson Named Editor Of Variety.com; Our Boy Mike Newall Hired On by Inky
VARIETY: Chris Krewson has been tapped editor of Variety.com, overseeing all editorial content for the website and contributing to its vision and content strategy. Krewson, currently executive online editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, will report to Variety group editor Tim Gray. “We considered a lot of great people, but Chris was everybody’s favorite. With his innovative ideas, as well as his people skills, Chris will be a major asset as our website expands and improves. And since readers have indicated they want information in both print and online, Chris will be able to help us coordinate and differentiate the two […]
BOOKS: Atlas Mugged
BY SAINT JOHN BARNED-SMITH FOR OBIT.COM During her life, Ayn Rand created a shrouded, larger-than-life myth about herself. She credited only Aristotle as an inspiration for her beliefs and insisted that her philosophy, Objectivism – which conceived of man “as a heroic being with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute” – was a wholly original system. (Never mind that she read Nietzsche along with other philosophers and political theorists.) Ayn Rand changed her name (Alisa Rosenbaum) and home. The novelist and philosopher had […]
BOOKS: Glorious Bastard
ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH: The compact biography deftly recreates the scenes of Barney Ross’s life, of a striver “intoxicated by the clouds of cigar smoke hovering over the men in fedoras; the fists mummified in billiard cloth and tape; the mineral jelly smeared on gashed eyebrows; the tattoo of leather on leather….” Century moves from Ross’s early years in Chicago to his place in the history of Jewish prizefighting. More interesting to me, though, was the author’s ability to convey a life defined by strife, one that seemed to embody that of a generation. From the very beginning, “Life was a […]
BREAKING: Ted Kennedy Is Dead
BOSTON GLOBE: Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who carried aloft the torch of a Massachusetts dynasty and championed a liberal ideology during almost a half century in the Senate, but whose personal and political failings may have prevented him from realizing the ultimate prize of the presidency, died Tuesday night at his home in Hyannis Port. He was 77 and had been Senator Edward M. Kennedy battling brain cancer. Senator Edward M. Kennedy Overcoming a history of family tragedy, which included the assassinations of a brother who was president and another who sought to occupy the White House, Kennedy seized on […]
THIS JUST IN: DN Pays Tribute To Swells
BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH FOR THE PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS: … But what I’ll remember most is the sarcastic encouragement Swells gave an intern for no other reason than that he believed in me. And oh the trouble he gave me. When I let slip that I wasn’t into Britney Spears or the Monkees, I was doomed. The next week, I was the target of a piece in the Guardian about his attempts to educate me about music: Undaunted by the massive task before me, I then proceeded to lecture Tad . . . on just how . . . extraordinarily […]
CONCERNED AMERICAN: We Really Need To Talk
DEAR OLD WHITE MEN WHO RUN EVERYTHING, I will turn 23 in just about two months, which means that over a third of my life has been spent enduring the seemingly intentional incompetence of the Bush Administration, the contrarian Congresses of the Clinton years and ‘do nothing’ Dem-majority Congress of now. In that time, I have seen a catastrophic terrorist attack on my homeland. I have seen a government invade and occupy a country that harbored our attackers, and then manipulate the fear and anger those attacks aroused in the American people to justify the invasion of a country that […]
LIVE FROM DENVER: Me And Spike Lee
BY NICK POWELL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES DENVER — Black activists and celebrities alike gathered this morning at the Movies With A Message Brunch at Earl’s Restaurant in downtown Denver to celebrate the progress made by Senator Barack Obama in his quest for the White House. But while the theme of the party was celebrating the past, Oscar-nominated director and producer Spike Lee focused on the present, particularly the sometimes-tenuous relationship between the hip-hop community and the Obama campaign. Mr. Lee, who has often uses hip-hop music and casts hip-hop stars in his films, said that rappers should, well, […]
GOLDFINGER: Officially The Greatest Of All Time
ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH OLYMPIC CORRESPONDENT I owe you all an apology. The one day I don’t file a dispatch, all the shit hits the Olympic fan. First, Phelps won his seventh gold of the ’08 Games. Damn. But what a race! This was the 100m fly, which as you may recall, is one of Phelps weaker events – in that he is best in mid-distance events. Coming off the 50m mark, Phelps was in seventh place, and even heading into the final wall, it looked like he would lose. Then he pulled some weird half-stroke super-lunge, and ended up winning […]
OLYMPIAD: Here Comes The Strokes
BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH OLYMPIC CORRESPONDENT Yesterday, I wrote about Dara Torres and the slant-eye scandal. I promised I’d write about Crocker and Lochte today, but I’m feeling sorta “ehh…” about them, so we’re going to talk about strokes instead. For the swimmers among us, this will be Remedial Swimming 101. I apologize. Everyone else, listen up. (And double apologies for the vids, which are of course as campy as I could possibly find.) There are four competitive strokes currently swum in the Olympics today – the freestyle (i.e., the crawl stroke), the backstroke, the breaststroke, and the butterfly. Of […]