Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 96

Bulletproof: Cambodia, 1972

Believe it or not, the whole of journalism's history has yet to be put on the Web. And so we found ourselves at the New York Public Library last week, manning a microfilm reader in search of tidbits from the early 1970s. In the course of panning past endless panels from newspapers of yore, we stumbled upon a delectable surprise—a worthy entry for our ongoing Bulletproof Project, which seeks to catalogue all known instances of soldiers who were led to believe that magic could protect them...

Doing Away With the Veneer

Most authoritarians these days know better than to go the Papa Doc Duvalier route and declare themselves president-for-life. The occasional sham election does wonders in terms of keeping off the international heat, especially if your country is an important source of gas or bauxite.

But Nursultan Nazarbayev seems to be seriously considering bucking the trend, despite the fact that he's already his nation's de facto ruler until he sheds his mortal coil—there is no limit on the number of times ...

Armed Lounging in Angola

A secret major project beckons, so we're off to deal for a spell. To fill the void, please enjoy this sequel of sorts to that excellent "SAS in Malaya" video that we posted a few days back. The scene this time is strife-torn Angola, but the same jaunty atmosphere remains. And if this is your bag, check out the artist's other concoctions; we particularly admire his Bollywood-style take on post-colonial African conflict.

Tom Rakewell's Nightmare Lives

As the once-sparkling metropolis of Dubai flounders, it's worth revisiting Johann Hari's eerily prescient, deeply disturbing take on the city-state from earlier this year. There are lots of nasty anecdotes contained therein, but none more depressing than the fact that the United Arab Emirates still imprisons debtors, a practice abandoned in the United States during the early 1830s.

We immediately wondered if the UAE had any company in continuing this practice. But search as we might, we...

Child of the Raves

We've been thoroughly enjoying The A.V. Club's week-long "Best of the '00s" series, including today's installment on top cinematic performances. The site's writers certainly did the right thing by including Samantha Morton's star turn in Morvern Callar, one of our favorite movies of all time. The ending sequence, shown above, never ceases to create a lump in our throat, though we can't quite figure out why. Perhaps it's because it's one of those rare scenes in which music and chaos are used t...

The Gulag-Free Archipelago

Upon being presented with the map above, the first question that pops to most minds is, "Why is the incarceration rate in the United States so absurdly high?" But given our proclivity for the esoteric, we now find ourselves wondering, "Why is the incarceration rate in Indonesia so darn low?"

There is certainly no single, all-encompassing answer to that head-scratcher. There's probably something to be said for the law-abiding nature of most Indonesians, perhaps buttressed by the importance of ...

Animal Rights in Lahore

We shudder to think how PETA might react if the organization had access to Lahore's bustling camel market, which buzzed with more activity than usual in the runup to Eid al-Adha:

The camel traders who brought camels from different cities of southern Punjab and Sindh were sold like hotcakes on Friday evening. The traders too reduced the prices almost half as compared to a week ago. A camel with earlier price tag of Rs 100,000 or above was sold at Rs 40,000 to 50,000 while the highest price did...

"New Villages"

You might recall how a few years back, Britain's anti-insurgency tactics in 1950s Malaysia were touted as a model for American forces in Iraq. That turned out to be poppycock, of course, since the British method involved tactics far too unpalatable for the post-colonial world to stomach. Among those tactics, as described in today's edition of Malaysia's The Star, was the forced relocation of half-a-million ethnic Chinese citizens:

"We were really innocent victims back then. The British just...

The Demise of "Criminal Insanity"

In reading about the murder of four police officers near Tacoma, we were most struck by the prime suspect's obvious paranoid schizophrenia—a disease that seems to have been wholly untreated, in part because his family members were afraid of staging any sort of medical intervention:

As part of the child-rape investigation, the sheriff's office interviewed Clemmons' sister in May. She told them that "Maurice is not in his right mind and did not know how he could react when contacted by Law...

Surrounded by Seeds

As you tuck into your fourth helping of stuffing tomorrow evening, spare a few seconds to think about some of our less fortunate brothers from history—specifically the valiant disciples of Nikolai Vavilov, who deserves a place alongside Norman Borlaug in the pantheon of agricultural saints. Vavilov spent much of his career traveling the world in search of plant genetic materials, which he stockpiled at his institute in St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad). For his troubles, Vavilov was...