Kampot
Since arriving in Phnom Penh, I’ve already managed two short trips down to Kampot, a somnolent town 150km south of the capital. Although both were work trips, I was struck by the charm of the town’s riverine setting and have planned a dedicated weekend of reading and indolence at the French-run Les Manguiers guesthouse, whose...
Lon Rith
The nights now are cool and humid, alive with the whisper of insects and the chk-chk of tiny geckos. I am sitting on my balcony after a long spell of wine-induced sloth, staring down at the pin-pricks of moto headlights and the tumult of the fountains in Hun Sen Park. After just sixty days, fragments...
Pisah Khmer
After two months, my Khmer is coming along like a dry-season slum fire. I now have a tutor named Sokha, a former journalist, who comes to my apartment on Sundays to guide me through a fairly solid textbook course. Speaking Khmer is not too difficult in comparative terms — I’ve met a lot of people...
Khmer New Year
Khmer New Year and the stifling heat of mid-April have conspired to cast a smothering blanket over Phnom Penh. Just about everything is shut: even the roadside barbers have folded up their chairs, unhooked their mirrors, and scattered back to the provinces to pursue the cycle of binge-eating, Buddhist offerings and family activities that marks...
Censorship of Farrago
‘A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged . . . [it is] the skin of a living thought that may vary in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.’ — US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. I’ve been dismayed to hear, even amongst the distractions...
Porn: Why Censorship Won’t Work
While I was in Saigon I found the time to write an opinion piece about censorship of internet pornography, which has now been published at Online Opinion and has sparked some interesting debate that has helped me to clarify my views on the issue. My article — which has also cropped up in The Nation,...
Gold Tower 42
Like Saigon, Phnom Penh is booming, and the Cambodian nouveau riche — as nouveaux riches are wont to do — is busily casting about for new ways to flaunt its wealth. To service this new demographic, an old government hospital at the intersection of Sihanouk and Norodom Boulevards has recently been flattened to make way...
Chamkarmon district
Phnom Penh is about two hours from the Vietnamese border, a trip broken only by a ubiquitous half-hour lunch stop and a short break at Neak Loung, where cars, buses, motos and pedestrians are borne across the Mekong on rusting ferries. Due to the abundance of foreign aid the highways here are well-sealed and, excepting...
TPHCM Phat Trien!
Since China’s economic rise, the ironies of ‘market socialism’ have become something of a staple of international journalism. Indeed, the story of socialism yielding to neoliberal economics can be sketched in sharp, simple contrasts: Mao and Motorola; Deng and Disney; Tiananmen and Toyota. But despite all of this — and all irony aside — I...
Reading Saigon
I’m sitting in my hotel off Bui Vien Street in central Saigon, exhausted from the early start and aching in the legs from today’s walk. I’m stealing wireless, achingly slow, from somewhere nearby; and my Windows taskbar is in a state of constant excitement, informing me, every few seconds, of connections granted and denied. My...
More Thoughts on International Justice
After getting myself up to date with the slow progress of the Khmer Rouge trials, I’ve put together a new article for the London-based libertarian magazine Spiked Online, which has since been published and ‘syndicated’ (i.e. copied and pasted) to a number of Cambodian news blogs. In my piece, I take a critical look at...
Windschuttle Redux
To my amusement, a link to my last post about Keith Windschuttle cropped up in an anti-left love-in on Daily Telegraph journalist Tim Blair’s weblog. In between I’m-not-sorry-cos-I-didn’t-do-it screeds, one Windschuttle admirer described me as: …a left-leaning blogger who encountered [Windschuttle’s] work at university and secretly holds respect for [him]. Thus proving that taking the...
