My 24 year old landlady, the R&B rapper, Wangechi Waweru Mwende, survived a horrific car accident four years ago. Today she’s rebuilding her life and career without much fuss or desire…
After staying in Nairobi 24 hours on no sleep, I took a flight to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to attend a conference entitled Africa-Asia: ‘A New Axis of Knowledge 2.’ …
Dawn: Mwingi Rd., Kileleshwa, Nairobi. My Lufthansa flight -an Airbus A340-300 — touched down last night at 8:11 pm local time. It has taken me an entire summer to prepare…
My Mom’s best friend, my surrogate mother growing up, was an opera singer named Maria Callas. No, not that Maria Callas, the tempestuous vocal genius and companion to Aristotle Onassis. This…
[Read full story in Smithsonian.com] His reconstructed faces have tongues that taste and eyelids that blink. But will they withstand the test of time? [Dec. 9, 2016] There have been…
Harbin, Manchuria: Officials here seem reluctant to spotlight the Japanese germ warfare scientists and what they did to thousands of local inhabitants here in 1932 and beyond. Perhaps that’s the…
I realize I never finished the story of Harbin, which I visited nearly a year ago. It began with my need to research this icy Russian-Jewish-Chinese enclave in Manchuria, home…
Just two blocks from my Charleston-style home on Bridges Farm Rd., I plunge almost every day into Lake Davidson, the horseshoe-shaped lake with the gooey clay bottom. On sunny days,…
You think about the pit mix who was young once along with your children. They were all of a piece. The dog with the pointy ears and pink and black…
January 11, 2016. As I stepped off the train at Harbin West station after an eight hour train ride across the Manchurian flatlands from Beijing, the station was moist and…