Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Land of the Headhunters
Last summer, I met a group working on a really cool project at the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin. Anthropologist Aaron Glass was working with William Wasden, a tribal historian and singer from the Kwakwakw'wakw tribe in Canada, to document a collection of the tribe's artifacts held in the museum's collections.
Glass recently completed another really cool project with the Kwakwakw'wakw, presenting a series of film screenings and concerts on the West Coast and in New York and Washington. I covered the project for Smithsonian, and am hoping to one day see the film myself.
Labels: aaron, curtis, film, glass, headhunters, kwakwakw'wakw
Friday, November 21, 2008
Dumb Political Moves, Wikipedia Edition
A left-wing German politician with a shady past as a Stasi bodyguard took on Wikipedia's 600+ million users last week and, well, lost. Had he just left well enough alone, he might have stayed in happy semi-obscurity. But when he filed a court injunction to have the German portal for Wikipedia shut down because he took offense at some of the details in his entry on the site, he drew far more attention to his character flaws and guaranteed himself a place in Internet censorship infamy forever.
Dumb. Almost as dumb as signing up for a job with the East German Secret Police in the late 1980s.
Dumb. Almost as dumb as signing up for a job with the East German Secret Police in the late 1980s.
Labels: germany, heilmann, lutz, spiegel, stasi, wikipedia
Friday, November 07, 2008
Gaston Acurio, Peruvian superchef
I was in Peru in September working on some archaeology stories. While I was in Lima I sought out Peruvian chef Gaston Acurio. We had lunch at his restaurant La Mar in Lima, and I went with a group of Mexican journalists to his flagship Astrid y Gaston that night. (I met up with him at a press conference, which required negotiating my way through hordes of Peruvian journalists eager for an interview, above.)
As my article for Portfolio.com argues, he may be the most famous chef you've never heard of -- he's got restaurants all over South American and Mexico, one in Madrid, and is opening three or four in the US in the next year. Peruvian food is really incredible, when done well, and Acurio is its most effective evangelist. I was a big fan of cebiche in particular -- it's more delicate and not quite as explosively fiery as the Mexican stuff, which lets the flavors of the ingredients mingle with the lime and aji pepper that it's "cooked" in. (Cebiche is raw fish marinated in citrus juice.) Great stuff.
Labels: acurio, cebiche, food, gaston, la mar, peru, portfolio.com
Monday, November 03, 2008
Turkish Temples, Take Two
I wrote a feature for this month's Smithsonian on Gobekli Tepe, the landmark dig in Turkey that is reshaping the way prehistoric archaeologists think about the earliest days of civilization. The photos that ran with the piece, by German photographer Berthold Steinhilber, are amazing. So far the article has been a hit with readers, topping the magazine's most-read and most-emailed list for a week straight.
(Speaking of photos, thanks to Rebecca Miller for the excellent portrait that accompanies the Q&A with me on smithsonian.com)
Labels: Archaeology, Gobekli, schmidt, Smithsonian, temples, Turkey
