'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Lives and livelihoods in two ME blogs

My able tech assistant (and son) put Google Reader onto my computer as well as the Analytics last week. He said it's the best RSS reader he knows, and showed my how you can aggregate different feeds into tags and themes, etc.

That meant I needed to go through the slightly chaotic collection of blogs that I've been tagging with my "Delicious" system over the past few months, and pick out a subset to put into my Google Reader. Lots of the "usual suspects" there-- including a couple of the BBC's excellently organized RSS feeds, Juan Cole, TPM, etc, etc. Two that I put in that have given me particular pleasure reading the feeds from have been these:

Inside Iraq, a blog written by half a dozen of the very dedicated Iraqi journalists who work for the McClatchy news bureau in in Baghdad.

As you may know, McClatchy's news coverage is about the best there is from Iraq, and this is due overwhelmingly to the work of these Iraqis. In the blog, though, they get to write much more informally about their lives and the neighborhoods they live in. Now that Faiza and Riverbend are no longer in Iraq to give us their vividly written, very intimate accounts of what daily life is like there, Inside Iraq is the next best thing.

Read Correspondent Hussein's recent reflection about the tragedy of Dying Alone, or Sahar IIS's post about the trouble her dental-student daughter has been having finding enough patients to practice her skills on. Or, come to think of it, any of the posts on the blog, and you'll learn a lot about what out-of-the-office life is like for-- I should imagine-- mainly middle-class Iraqis these days.

(Plus, remember that these writers are different from many Iraqis because on the one hand they have jobs, but on the other the jobs they have make many or most of them direct targets for insurgents, so their lives are often lived under tremendous pressure.)

Land and People, a blog described as "A source on food, farming, and rural society" that's written by American University of Beirut agronomist Rami Zurayk.

Zurayk provides a lively and very well-informed take on agricultural issues as they affect not just Lebanon but also most other countries outside the rich world. He writes a lot about international agricultural policy (e.g. here and here.) He also dives into a lot of specifics about agricultural and environmental issues within Lebanon itself, including with this recent little reflection on recipes that use pomegranate, the health benefits of pomegranates, etc.

On his sidebar, he has links to some of his more political writings. He's a Palestinian. (L&P also recently had an interesting post expressing his views on a project aimed at Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian cooperation in seedstock improvement.)

... With both of these blogs, as with many others that I have learned a lot from in recent years, what I've found of particular value is the opportunity to read these views/posts as they were directly and thoughtfully written by the authors, and un-mediated by the editorial or story-shaping choices of corporate editors. It is truly incredible, the whole new set of windows that the internet gives us into the lives, views, and concerns of other people around the world. (Thanks, Darpa!)

I think we should also give special recognition to McClatchy, a media corporation that respects and trusts the people who work-- and risk their lives-- for it enough to allow them to write the Inside Iraq blog.

If any of you can recommend other blogs that have similar qualities of immediacy, good writing, thoughtfulness, and insight into the lives and livelihoods of people who live outside the rich portions of the world, do please send in a comment that has, obviously, the URL, and also your own short note on what you find distinctive about it. Thanks!