Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, international relations scholar and writer.
The phrase "axis of evil" was first used by U.S. President George W. Bush and originally referred to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. It was used in Bush's State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, less than five months after the 9/11 attacks and almost a year before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and often repeated throughout his presidency. He used it to describe foreign governments that, during his administration, allegedly sponsored terrorism and sought weapons of mass destruction.
Edward James Martin Koppel is a British-born American broadcast journalist, best known as the anchor for Nightline, from the program's inception in 1980 until 2005.
Rob Gifford is a British radio correspondent and journalist. He has degrees in Chinese Studies from Durham University and in Regional Studies from Harvard University. He began to learn Mandarin Chinese in 1987 whilst in China.
The Darién Gap is a geographic region in the Isthmus of Darién or Isthmus of Panama connecting the American continents within Central America, consisting of a large watershed, forest, and mountains in Panama's Darién Province and the northern portion of Colombia's Chocó Department.
Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist and best-selling foreign policy author of several books about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia.
Aaron Louis Friedberg is an American political scientist. He served from 2003 to 2005 in the office of the Vice President of the United States as deputy assistant for national-security affairs and director of policy planning.
China National Highway 312 (312国道), also referred to as Route 312, is a key east-west route beginning in Shanghai and ending at Khorgas, Xinjiang in the Ili River valley, on the border with Kazakhstan. In total it spans 5,000 km (3,100 mi), passing through Jiangsu, Anhui, Henan, Shaanxi, Gansu before ending in Xinjiang. Besides Shanghai, cities of note on the route include Suzhou, Wuxi, Nanjing, Hefei, Xinyang, Nanyang, Xi'an, Lanzhou, Jiayuguan and Ürümqi.
A road movie is a film genre in which the main characters leave home on a road trip, typically altering the perspective from their everyday lives. Road movies often depict travel in the hinterlands, with the films exploring the theme of alienation and examining the tensions and issues of the cultural identity of a nation or historical period; this is all often enmeshed in a mood of actual or potential menace, lawlessness, and violence, a "distinctly existential air" and is populated by restless, "frustrated, often desperate characters". The setting includes not just the close confines of the car as it moves on highways and roads, but also booths in diners and rooms in roadside motels, all of which helps to create intimacy and tension between the characters. Road movies tend to focus on the theme of masculinity, some type of rebellion, car culture, and self-discovery. The core theme of road movies is "rebellion against conservative social norms".
Steven Alan Inskeep is an American journalist who is currently the host of Morning Edition and Up First on National Public Radio. Prior to being host of Morning Edition, Inskeep covered the Pentagon, the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush, the U.S. Senate, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and was host of Weekend All Things Considered.
River Elegy is an influential six-part documentary by Wang Luxiang, and co-written by Su Xiaokang, shown on China Central Television on June 16, 1988, which portrays the decline of traditional Chinese culture.
Gabrielle Dee Giffords is an American retired politician and gun control activist. She served as a member of the United States House of Representatives representing Arizona's 8th congressional district from January 2007 until January 2012, when she resigned because of a severe brain injury suffered during an assassination attempt. A member of the Democratic Party, she was the third woman in Arizona's history to be elected to the U.S. Congress.
Matt Bai is an American journalist, author and screenwriter. He is a contributing columnist for the Washington Post. Between 2014 and 2019, he was the national political columnist for Yahoo! News. On 25 July 2019, via Twitter, Bai announced he was leaving Yahoo! News to "focus on screenwriting". For more than a decade prior to that, he was the chief political correspondent for the New York Times Magazine, where he covered three presidential campaigns, as well as a columnist for the Times. His cover stories in the magazine include the 2008 cover essay "Is Obama the End of Black Politics?" and a 2004 profile of John Kerry titled "Kerry's Undeclared War". His work was honored in two editions of The Best American Political Writing. Bai is a graduate of the College of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University in Medford, MA, and Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, where the faculty awarded him the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. In 2014, Bai had two brief appearances as himself in the second season of TV show House of Cards.
Zhelaizhai is a village on the edge of the Gobi desert in Gansu province, China. The area was renamed after Liqian, an ancient county, and is located in Jiaojiazhuang township, Yongchang County. Some of the modern-day residents of Zhelaizhai, now known as Liqian village, have been suspected to be descendants of a group of Roman soldiers that were never accounted for after being captured in the Battle of Carrhae. Although this story has been seized upon by some area residents, recent authorities have shown that the notion has serious shortcomings.
Tom Zoellner is an American author and journalist. He is the author of popular non-fiction books which take multidimensional views of their subject. His work has been widely reviewed and has been featured on The Daily Show. His 2020 book Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire was a finalist for the Bancroft Prize in history and in 2021 won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
Locomotive is a 2013 children's book written and illustrated by Brian Floca. A non-fiction book written primarily in free verse, the book follows a family as they ride a transcontinental steam engine train in summer of 1869. The book details the workers, passengers, landscape, and effects of building and operating the first transcontinental railroad. The book also contains prose about the earlier and later history of locomotives. The book took Floca four years to create, which included a change in perspective from following the crew of the train to following a family. Floca conducted extensive research including his own train ride and consultation with experts to ensure he had the details all correct.
Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power is a 2004 feature film by directors Sandra Dickson and Churchill Roberts. It was a National PBS Broadcast, on Independent Lens, in February 2006. The film won the 2006 Erik Barnouw Award for Outstanding Historical Documentary, of the Organization of American Historians, the Audience Award of the Detroit Docs Film Festival, in 2005, and the Critic's Award for Outstanding Feature Documentary of the New York UrbanWorld Film Festival, in 2005.
Geoffrey Cain is an American journalist, author, and writer and anthropologist. He specializes in geopolitics and technology. His work has appeared in The Economist, Time, Wired (magazine), Foreign Policy, The New Republic and The Wall Street Journal. Cain is also a regular commentator on Bloomberg TV, BBC, CNN, and NPR.
Dinah Lee Küng is an American-born Swiss journalist and novelist. She reported from East Asia for 20 years for Business Week,The Economist,International Herald Tribune, and The Washington Post. She has been active in international human rights work. She has also written a number of novels, short stories, and radio plays.
On Such a Full Sea is a speculative fiction novel by Chang-rae Lee, published on January 7, 2014, by Riverhead Books. It is Lee's fifth novel, and the story uses the first person plural to tell the journey of the young fish tank diver, Fan, as she pursues her missing boyfriend. The novel takes place in a post-apocalyptic dystopian world ruined by environmental disaster where the population is divided between those who live in Charter villages, highly regulated and self-contained labor settlements, and the open counties, land that is full of crime and unsupervised by the government. The entire population also is afflicted with "C," a disease affecting the rest of the population that eventually kills everyone who has it. The work deals with themes of capitalism, environmental concerns, healthcare, race, and postcolonialism. It received positive reception at the time of its release, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2014 as well as shortlisted for the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
