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I started my Sunday with this discussion between journalist Guy Raz and volcanologist Andrés Ruzo, whose childhood conversations at home led him to an amazing discovery in the Amazon Basin of Peru. (Because it contains have of the basin, Brazil is the best-known of the Amazon countries, but several upstream neighbors also have vast tracts of the basin and its forests.) I recommend listening to the audio and then watching Dr. Ruzo's full TED Talk , given in 2014 in Rio de Janeiro. His story begins with curiosity, legend, and history. It provides insight into indigenous knowledge, geothermal science, ecology, and the concept of ecotourism. It even touches on coffee! And from the TED Radio summary, I learn of Dr. Ruzo's coffee connection. In addition to growing up in Peru, part of his childhood was near volcanoes in Nicaragua, which means he is not far removed from coffeelands. Andrés Ruzo has written his story in The Boiling River

Journalist Carrie Kahn reports on legal measures that Nicaragua's increasingly authoritarian president has recently implemented to restrict dissent . In the guise of fighting terrorism, new laws appear to make free expression and free assembly even more difficult. Ortega signals a willingness to continue ignoring human-rights organizations, the international community, the Catholic Church and to embolden a violent minority of Nicaraguans to commit atrocities in support of his regime. For more details of how such a beautiful country arrived at such a terrible impasse so quickly, please see my #SOSnicaragua (May) and Nicaragua's Kent State (July) posts, as well as journalist Jon Lee Anderson's Fake News  article, appearing in the current issue of the New Yorker . He describes Ortega's application of lessons learned from autocrates abroad. Parallel Just as Ortega is intensifying his attacks on dissidence by branding protestors as terrorists, parallel strategies are emerg...

Over the weekend, New York Times journalist Kirk Semple and photojournalist Daniele Volpe provide a comprehensive update on the dire condition of Nicaragua. For those of us who love Nicaragua -- meaning anybody who has visited -- the title is heart-breaking, because it summarizes a dire condition that we could not have imagined six months ago: ‘There’s No Law’: Political Crisis Sends Nicaraguans Fleeing . (See my July 27 Nicaragua's Kent State  post for a bit more about recent developments.) Semple details the losses in the tourism industry that have resulted from the government's lawless response to protests since April. Photographer Volpe captures one of my very favorite places in this photo -- the usually bustling main square of Granada, now idle. The NYT article hints at a question I have had since the very beginning. The second political life of the FSLN has relied on a strange combination of revolutionary rhetoric and nostalgia on the one hand (left) and alliance with ru...

The title of this post is redundant -- like "chili con carne with meat" -- but it is in fact how a U.S. visitor to Mexico City would need to get a quesadilla that would meet the key expectation of queso-ness. Reporting for PRI's The World , journalist Maya Kroth recently explored the culinary and linguistic story of the cheeseless quesadilla .

The once-thriving country of Venezuela has been suffering severe political and economic problems for close to two decades, under the presidencies of Hugo Chaves and Nicolás Madura. The distress is now so severe that at least 2 million Venezuelans are refugees , and many who remain in the country are suffering badly. President Maduro fails his country Because both presidents have been socialists, some opponents of socialism apply several logical fallacies to conclude that it proves socialism is disastrous. Writing for Yahoo! Finance , market journalist Dion Rabouin explains why socialism per se is not the cause of Venezuela's woes. This is especially important to me as I watch a different kind of political and humanitarian disaster unfold in Nicaragua . There the president continues to speak as a leftist while governing from the far right; this has created a dangerous kind of confusion among those few U.S. politicians who are paying attention . Lagniappe With the recent rise of de...

The PRI radio program The World  is -- as the name implies -- a font of geographic knowledge. Sometimes I am lucky enough to catch the entire program. Yesterday I heard only a few short bits during the broadcast and the rebroadcast. It turns out that what I heard was the last minute and later the first minute of a two-minute story. Entitled The History of Latin America in One Song . PRI has recently improved the online archive of the show, so that the segment can be found by that title at the end of the list of segments comprising the entire episode. The story is about Mexican-Canadian musician Boogát's upbeat homage to Latin America. The song includes a bit of slang and a lot of proper nouns, so people who only somewhat speak Spanish -- like me -- might want to consult the printed lyrics and translation on Musixmatch. Boogát - Aquí The song indeed celebrates history and biography, but I notice a lot of geography in these few words. The song might just push aside Santana's ...

The April 2018 issue of  National Geographic focuses on race, and  begins with a critical look at the magazine's own sordid history on the topic. As new Editor-in-Chief Sarah Goldberg writes in her introduction, "It’s possible to say that a magazine can open people’s eyes at the same time it closes them." From the NatGeo 2018 caption: Photographer Frank Schreider  shows men from Timor island his camera in a 1962 issue. The magazine often ran photos of “uncivilized” native people seemingly fascinated by “civilized” Westerners’ technology. Editor Goldberg was also part of a broader discussion about representations of the past in a March 2018 episode of On the Media . On the same day I first read the National Geographic editorial (I got a bit behind on the magazine), I heard Shades of Privilege , an intriguing and important story about colorism as a particularly insidious form of racism in several national contexts. Together, I believe these items are good starting point...

One of the first things I ever posted on the web was an article about lyophilisation , better known as freeze-drying. It was for the Wornick Company , my employer at the time and one of the pioneers in the process. Even though we no longer produced freeze-dried products, they were part of our history and I was involved in some very nerdy financial machinations about freeze-dried fruit. I even took a bunch of the product with me on my first trip to the Amazon . So I know something about freeze-drying, and about what it is good for. To the ever-growing list of things I have learned from my wonderful alumni, we can add this: I just learned freeze-dried corn meal is a thing, that I have probably had it, and that it is not good. Mexican food guru Diana Kennedy is not a fan. Image by Eleanor Skrzat for Taste . In The Tortilla Cartel , journalist Elizabeth Dunn describes the strange story of Maseca. This powder gives home cooks and even some restaurants the idea that they are making tortilla...

The Library of Congress has recently acquired the Mapa de Ecatepec-Huitziltepec , a manuscript that was prepared in 1593 and is one of the few original documents surviving from 16th-Century Mesoamerica. It was apparently created by indigenous Nahuatl cartographers but reflects the rapid transition of a society under Conquest. LOC screenshot of the Codex. Follow link above for the full story, and the link below for a more detailed view. An image of the map is directly viewable (with panning and zooming) on the Library of Congress web site. The entry includes important metadata, including some modern landmarks to orient the viewer. I have included them in the map below to give readers a sense of the area covered by this treasure. My favorite librarian and I spent the summer of 1989 in the region covered by this map , and encountered evidence -- four centuries later -- of the imposed fusion of cultures that it manifests.

PLEASE CLICK MAP for a BETTER VIEW The map (above) that ESRI geographer Krista Schlyer chose for the top of her photo-map essay response to the so-called border wall is indicative of the care she and the rest of the ESRI team have taken with this entire exhibit. As a geographer who lived in this map for seven years (1990-1994 in Tucson and 1994-1997 in Pharr), I notice a few important things that this map captures nicely. First, the borderlands are identified by the border, but not strictly defined by it. As Oscar Martinez argues in  Border People , it is a zone that extends approximately 100 miles in each direction from the line that gives the region its identity. In every sense except strict legalities, this region is neither the United States nor Mexico. It is a third entity that is both divided and united by a line that meanders through its center. In addition to Border People , I recommend Tom Miller's On the Border  as an introduction to the place; I had the privilege of...