What I did understand, though, was the city’s history. Even today, I can walk through the streets in my mind and see the places as if traveling back in time: the Piazza Maggiore, the Fountain of Neptune, the seven churches of Santo Stefano, the terracotta sculptures of Niccolò dell’Arca. Even the Roxy Bar.

The reason I know these things so well is because it was impressed upon me that I should know them by our host father, Konrad, who himself was an outsider and who felt that you should be ashamed to live in a place whose history you don’t know.  It’s a value I have always tried to practice, and which now has seen itself play out in an unexpected way, in a city on this side of the Atlantic, in an app.

New York City is where one my host brothers, Benedikt, found himself living several years ago. And in trying to research the history of the place in a satisfying way, he was shocked by the paltry and shallow selection of guidebooks on the subject.  He thought about writing such a guidebook himself, but ultimately decided that an app could do more with less.  So without an inkling that the next few years would be spent compiling information and photos and digging up the hidden history street corners across the city, he and a friend Nicola (also from Bologna) began working on the app that has just been released:  New York: History of a City, a huge and invaluable resourse, with 132,500 words of original content, over 400 sites, some 700 historic and current photos, and nearly 14 hours of audio, not to mention, the interactive functions, “Walk-by” notifications, timelines, missed sights memory and more.

So if you happen to live there, or plan to visit, and want to put the pieces of the past back together, now you can walk around the city and not feel ashamed by all the things you don’t know.  You can either get it from the website here or see it in the App Store here.

World Hum: It sounds weird to say that pilgrimages are hot, but it seems that pilgrimages are on the upswing. Is that your sense? And if so, what do you think is the draw for modern travelers?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: This book started out as a series of emails from the Camino de Santiago, and after the first one, my friend Ralph wrote to me from Berlin and, half-jokingly, said that as long as I could find a way to argue that pilgrimage was the hottest new thing in international youth fashion, I probably had a book on my hands…

Read the interview here.

That was more or less the extent of my experience with Invisible Children until this year, when the Kony 2012 video was unleashed and we were were deluged with stories not really about the LRA or Joseph Kony, but about the video and its makers.  It’s hard to explain what was so maddening about this.  After all, weren’t they doing something good?  Didn’t they mean well?  Wasn’t what they were saying true?

The answer is a highly qualified “yes” to all those. The problem, as others have pointed out better than I can, is that the storyline in the video is tailored to a 200-year-old narrative where Africa is a helpless child that needs help from a Western adult.  It’s a narrative that Teju Cole now famously called the White Savior Industrial Complex and it still has the power to move mountains of money, as we saw with the Greg Mortenson affair last year.  Mortenson grew up as a missionary in East Africa and studied this fundraising technique well.

One reason for the persistence of this storyline is that it’s embedded in the very idea of culture, which was formalized (in English) with the 1871 publication of Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture, the book that effectively launched the field of anthropology. In it, Tylor outlines his vision of the past, cribbed partly from Darwin and partly from the Bible.  He asserted that human beings began in a primal state of nature called “savagery.”  As things improved they picked up skills like metallurgy, manufacturing and morals, which marked their transition into “barbarism.”  Then in the final stage, they arrived at civilization, which he also called Culture with a capital “C.”

Anthropologists, Tylor wrote, were not supposed to merely study human culture, but to improve it.  Their task was to root out the old savage beliefs and replace them with newer and better ones.  Civilized ones. “[W]here barbaric hordes groped blindly, cultured men can often move onward with a clear view,” he wrote. “It is [the] office of ethnography to expose the remains of crude old culture which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction.”

This is the soundtrack that plays in the background of Kony 2012.

The problem is that, for those of us who have spent time in different parts of Africa, seeing those places through this frame makes them barely recognizable.  It simply doesn’t correspond to the present-day reality, which is far more complex and interesting and human.

Last fall, for example, I was in Nairobi and one of the stories I was working on was about the famine in the Horn of Africa. This was not your typical Africa-as-helpless-victim story, a la Nicholas Kristof.  It was about a group of relatively well off Kenyans who were raising money for famine relief in their own country.  The people I was writing about were Nairobi-based Rotarians, but they were part of a larger effort called Kenyans for Kenya which raised $8 million to send food relief to the Turkana region of Kenya.

This is all fairly straightforward stuff,  to fans of Kony 2012, Kristof and Greg Mortenson, it might seem like something new.  I would never have done the story if it had fallen on the Kony 2012/White Savior spectrum, because the point of those stories is never the story itself.  As Dinaw Mengestu observed, “the real star of Kony 2012 isn’t Joseph Kony, it’s us.”  It’s about the viewer as savior.  What I loved about Kenyans for Kenya is that it wasn’t.

The story, The Land that Rain Forgot, is not one that will change the world. But I hope it at least shows how the world can change.  You can read it here.

While I was there, I spent the first few days just walking around noticing all the things that were different and all the things that were the same. One day I was looking for a little restaurant some friends and I used to go to.  I stopped at a bar I thought might have been the place.  There were some young people standing around near the gate, so I asked them if this used to be the place.

“I don’t know,” one of them said. “How long ago was it?”

“1996.”

“Ha!” She laughed, ” I wasn’t even born yet.”

The whole trip was filled with moments like that, and I always had the feeling of being able to see the past and present and future converging at one point. Yet while many things had changed, others hadn’t, like the warmth and humor and openness that I remembered so well.  You can read the story here, see some great photos by Sarah Elliot here, and listen to an interview I did for Michel Martin’s Tell Me More about it all here.  If that’s not enough, you can even go back and read a story I did way back called Test Day, which is still oddly popular, and which serves as a nice bookend to this one.

When I got to the counter, I asked the young man, whose name was Paul, about getting a SIM card for my phone so I could make calls in Kenya. I handed the phone to him. He took it, looked at it, then shook his head in pity.

“This is a very old phone. It is a phone from zamani!” he said. The Swahili word he used means “a long time ago,” but it can also mean ancient times, prehistory. I felt a little like Richard Leakey bearing some fossilized tool I’d just dug up in the Olduvai Gorge.

The phone was not that old. I bought it in 2005 in Nigeria.

Read the rest here.

Bellos, who directs the translation program at Princeton University, tells how the writer and scientist Douglas Hofstadter once sent a French poem to dozens of people and asked them to translate it. Each result was different, yet each was legitimate.

There is no perfect translation. A translation is an act of re-creation, an appropriation of the original in an attempt to find an acceptable match in another language. Because words are imbued with many tones and histories and connotations, literal translation simply isn’t possible. Bellos likens translating to painting a portrait: The result is not the same as the original, but if it’s done well, it captures the original’s essence.

Read the rest here.

“But the cost of living,” she added.

“You mean the food prices?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “That was when life began to change for us. The cost of living keeps going up. There are some people who can’t even feed themselves. Can you imagine not being able to feed yourself?”

I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “I can imagine.”

It seemed like the right answer. But later, as I thought about it, I realized that in fact it is very hard to imagine. I can imagine it in my head, but I can’t really imagine what that would feel like. Maybe the mind doesn’t let one imagine those kinds of things. Maybe when your belly is full, the possibility simply vanishes. There is no way to know how you would react.

Read the rest here.