RadioLab: The Podcast

So, um, hello again. It's been oh a month and a half since my last post from Pakistan. So here's a quick recap. Since that post, I returned to Afghanistan to file this story for The World about an Afghan journalist who has been in jail for the last 6 months for insulting Islam. (The reason I'm posting the story is that, well, he's still there. Nothing's changed.)

Then I went to Iran with a bunch of American magicians and Canadian poets to meet poets from Iran. It all culminated in one balmy evening in Kashan where we performed our magic and read our poetry and the Iranians read their poetry, and no one quite understood each other, so it was sort of like farce, but oddly beautiful too, given the political realities, like some last-ditch diplomatic effort choreographed by Lewis Carroll. I'll write about that more real soon, but meanwhile, while I was in Iran I met up with a French cartoonist friend of mine who drew these pictures of one of the events:







Well so the artist's name is Nicolas Wild and I strongly recommend his two-part graphic novel, Kabul Disco, as well as his blog, which is great if you read French and even if you don't. Kabul Disco is being translated into other languages as we speak and is ripe for an American publisher.

So, after Iran I flew home to New York, just in time for the podcast debut of the"Radiolab: Pop Music" episode, featuring lots of amazing stories as usual, as well as a story about what happened when I took my accordion to Afghanistan and encountered the ghost of the late great Ahmad Zahir, a/k/a the Elvis of Afghanistan.



For the record, since some of you have asked, the youtube video of my Johnny Cash-inspired accordion performance in Afghanistan is still up. It seems that some servers say the video is "no longer available," but then again about a thousand more people have watched it since then so that's not universal. I'm not sure what's going on, maybe some smarter minds can weigh in on this. Meanwhile, try it from a different computer is my lame advice. Or cross your fingers and click below:




Oh, one more thing. Since I opened this post with a piece of mine that seems to have had no impact at all, here's one that seems to have had a modest one: a few months back I wrote an article for the Washington Monthly, "The Schools That the Taliban Don't Torch," about a neglected program for aid delivery called the National Solidarity Program. Last week Senator Dick Durbin gave a speech on the floor about aid in Afghanistan, and he quoted the article, and at least I'm told by Durbin's office that we'll now see an increase in funding to that program. I think that's a good thing.