Last year before I moved to New York, I spent the night at a friend’s house in Brooklyn and found myself reading Vice Magazine, which is something I hadn’t done in a long time. Vice, for those of you who aren’t in the snarky hipster set, is a magazine for snarky hipsters. Traditionally, I found it amusing and endlessly aggravating. The issue I was reading, however, was something all together different; it was devoted entirely to the Iraq war and was FANTASTIC. It’s a little bit after the fact (The Iraq Issue came out six months ago or more) but still well worth a look. What’s most amazing is how much of the magazine is devoted to simple dialogue with normal Iraqi people (and how rare this journalistic approach has been in the last four years). Here’s the issue, each and every article.

There’s more. This month’s Vice features an intersting article about heroin rehab in Afghanistan. There’s a lot to wade through to get there, but it’s well worth reading.

One last bit, Vice has also launched a online TV channel, found here. Which has awesome news features about mining practices in Virginia, oil spills in Brooklyn, drug running in Lebanon, and the ongoing crisis in the Sudan.

It’s all good stuff. I’m as surprised as anyone to see it come out of Vice, but, the world is a strange and wonderful place.

When it comes to immigration, it’s more than just people crossing borders.  Last year immigrants in America sent over $100 billion in remittances back to their countries of origin - that’s a whole lot of greenbacks flowing from the First World to the Third. 

The downside: Companies like Western Union that charge steep fees (8-15%) and apply unfair exchange rates to these transactions, which represent cold hard profits for money transfer agencies and the loss of hard earned dollars (and another layer of exploitation) for immigrant workers.   

The good news: Monday, September 10th marked the official beginning of a transnational boycott of Western Union, led by Transnational Institute for Grassroots Reasearch and Action (TIGRA), to protest the fees and exchange rates, and to force the creation a community benefit agreement that would allocate a dollar from every transaction to a trust for development projects both in immigrant communities in the US, and abroad in their countries of origin. 

The power of this realitively new movement is combining issues of transnational economy with immigration and exposing these extra layers of institutionalized exploitation faced by immigrants in the US.  The boycott is the newest development in TIGRA’s campaign; previous actions included a Mother’s Day march and rally at Western Union headquarters in NYC that coincided with their yearly shareholder’s meeting (which was attended by movement members who had themselves appointed as proxy shareholder reps). 

Click the links to find out more!

Knife-forks are abstract ideas, fantasies that make us feel better about a hypothetical world in which they’re adopted, but don’t actually improve the real world in which they’re not… Some people are actually working, inventing chopsticks or something, to improve the real world, not some hypothetical world in which everyone pays more attention to their eating. And distracting them with your knife-forks hampers such progress.

There’s a highly amusing and insightful article over at typewriting about creating functional solutions for the world as it exists, not idealized solutions for the world as we would like it to be. No matter how clever an idea might be, it’s no good if inherent human flaws get in the way of its execution.

Another way to express this idea might be: “tailor the clothes to fit the person, not the other way around.”

Great stuff to keep in mind for anyone looking to make the world a better place.