What We’re Reading

Preeti Aroon: I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced, by Nujood Ali with Delphine Minoui. In 2008, Nujood, a 10-year-old girl in Yemen, was married to a man three times her age. Unsurprisingly, he treated her badly. But Nujood did something absolutely remarkable: She boldly went to the courthouse and demanded a divorce. And she ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.

Preeti Aroon: I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced, by Nujood Ali with Delphine Minoui. In 2008, Nujood, a 10-year-old girl in Yemen, was married to a man three times her age. Unsurprisingly, he treated her badly. But Nujood did something absolutely remarkable: She boldly went to the courthouse and demanded a divorce. And she got one. Using the simple language of a child, Nujood tells her story in first person, with help from journalist Delphine Minoui. 

Preeti Aroon: I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced, by Nujood Ali with Delphine Minoui. In 2008, Nujood, a 10-year-old girl in Yemen, was married to a man three times her age. Unsurprisingly, he treated her badly. But Nujood did something absolutely remarkable: She boldly went to the courthouse and demanded a divorce. And she got one. Using the simple language of a child, Nujood tells her story in first person, with help from journalist Delphine Minoui. 

Elizabeth Dickinson: The U.N. Security Council is expected soon to approve the phased withdrawal of peacekeepers from Eastern Chad. The mission, initially setup by the European Union and later adopted by the United Nations, has helped protect some 250,000 Darfuri refugees and 165,000 internally displaced Chadians. Their pull-out, Amnesty International and the United Nations have warned, could put those refugees at terrible risk.            

Charles Homans: In light of the recent death of its subject, an engrossing piece that Bruce Falconer wrote for the American Scholar in 2008 about Paul Schaefer, the patriarch of the Colonia Dignidad settlement in Chile. Schaefer was a German émigré who built a secretive religious settlement in southern Chile in the 1960s; beneath its bucolic exterior, Colonia Dignidad played host to decades of brainwashing and abuse of the settlement’s members, and served as a torture laboratory for the Pinochet regime.

Joshua Keating: The Open Society Institute’s Eurasianet, already my favorite online resource for news from Central Asia and the Caucasus, recently upped its blog game significantly with the addition of The Bug Pit, a great new Eurasian politics blog by globetrotting reporter and past FP contributor Joshua Kucera. (You’ll have to check out the blog to get the fascinating — but very gross — explanation of the title.) 

Britt Peterson: I have to say most of my extracurricular browsing over the last 24 hours has been related to last night’s Lost finale, from Jack Shafer’s predictably grouchy take-down on Slate to the weepy or over-the-top Kremlinological recaps on more favorable sites. I’m somewhere in between (I watched the show all the way through but found it frustratingly uneven and sloppy, and overambitious in a college freshman kind of way, so the cheesy, semi-ambiguous ending felt appropriate to me) but did want to point out that the show did a uniquely great job of getting foreign actors on TV screens, including the sadly underused Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada, British-born Nigerian actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Korean actress Yunjin Kim. With subtitles, even!

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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