June 2009 – Darin Cook

Kitchen bookshelves have never seen a cookbook like this before. No Julia Child or Bobby Flay in sight, but watch out for Fidel Castro and Kim Il Sung alongside recipes of their respective countries. Those looking to keep political conversation alive over dinnertime, Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States is the book for you. Chris Fair, a military and political analyst, knows that humans crave more than food alone and she dedicates her book “to everyone who is hungry for justice, peace, and security” by bringing international relations and world politics to the dinner table in an interesting cross section of ideas; with plenty of recipes, it is shelved in the cooking section of a bookstore, but there are equal parts foreign policy, dinner party etiquette, and evil dictator biography. Read more

Being newlyweds when we left for South Korea, we promised our families back home we wouldn’t procreate any children of our own while living abroad; mostly so our parents wouldn’t miss out on all the grandparent-y stuff, but also because we were travelling to delay any domesticity in the early stages of marriage. As English teachers at a private school, we saw dozens of students, between the ages of five and fifteen, in rotating classes throughout each day, so having children of our own was the furthest thing from our minds. But that did not stop us from thinking about baby names, because naming children in South Korea is not only a parental duty – foreign teachers in ESL schools are responsible for giving English names to students who don’t already have one. Read more

Dining Out With Dictators

The Name Game in Korean Classrooms