Travel

"We’re also making headway on ensuring that our diplomats reflect America’s remarkable diversity, which is one of our greatest strengths, including in our diplomacy. We have our first ever chief diversity and inclusion officer, who is spearheading an effort to analyze and address the obstacles that prevent underrepresented groups from joining and advancing at State. We’ve expanded the Pickering and Rangel fellowships and created, for the first time – thanks to the support of Congress and his committee – paid internships at State, along with strong congressional input and support for all of these efforts."   This week, I had the chance to testify before Congress and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the Biden administration’s proposed budget for… more »

Like early 20th century cultural anthropologists, John Lenoir set out in the 1970s, to spend some adventurous years doing fieldwork in an idyllic tropical paradise isolated from Western culture. But John never imagined how adventurous it would be. The readers of this fascinating and deeply moving memoir will experience the same surprises. John chose to work in the newly independent nation of Guyana, in the Amazon basin of South America. His aim was to explore the effect of African culture on a slave plantation society only recently freed from European colonialism. more »

"According to Paul Wolfram [Yale] ’21 PhD now a postdoc with the Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland, the study shows that 'the elephant in the room is the supply chain of fossil fuel-powered vehicles, not that of electric vehicles'. He notes that the faster we switch to electric vehicles, the better — at least in countries with a sufficiently decarbonized electricity supply, like the US Yale economics professor Ken Gillingham, whose research has focused extensively on alternative energy adoption in transportation, says this research provides a better understanding of how comprehensive carbon pricing — which includes the full supply chain — can shift consumers toward electric vehicles." more »

Ferida on this Holiday Season: This has been a rough two years. The pandemic seems to want to hang around in its various forms. Yet this time of the year is supposed to be cheerful and bright. So with that in mind, we took a ride around our local towns looking for the brightness of the season and found some homes lit up for the holiday. more »