Notes from the World

Oksana Lutsyshyna is a Ukrainian author and translator who currently serves as Associate Professor of Instruction in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. A native of Uzhhorod in Western Ukraine, she is the author of, among other works, the novels Ivan and Phoebe and Love Life as well as  the poetry collections Persephone Blues and Felicity's Poems. She has been the recipient of the Taras Shevchenko National Award in Fiction and the Lviv City of Literature UNESCO Prize and is a member of PEN Ukraine. We discussed Ukraine’s vibrant literary culture and the state of Ukraine in the shadow of Russia’s war there.

Dalia Alahmad is a writer and podcast producer from Jenin, now based in Ramallah, who works at the Palestine office of the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) as an outreach coordinator, though she is speaking here in her capacity as a private citizen. Notes from the World spoke to her about daily life in the West Bank and some of what the media coverage misses about Palestinians and their lives.

Tesla Takedown is a protest movement that grew out of the fury at the actions of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk, the world’s richest man, gave Donald Trump and Republican Party $290 million for the 2024 election cycle, thus becoming the largest individual donor during that election. Adam Sheridan is the volunteer Lead Organizer for Cooper River Indivisible, an affiliate chapter in southern New Jersey of the national Indivisible organization, which is a progressive movement and organization in the United States initiated in 2016 as a reaction to the first election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. He has been extensively involved in the Tesla Takedown protests in the area and joined us to talk a little bit about its activities and its goals.

Jared Olson is a writer and independent investigative journalist covering extractivism, organized crime and state violence in Honduras and Mexico. Based between Mexico City and San Pedro Sula, Honduras, his work has been published in The Baffler, The Nation, Foreign Policy, The New Humanitarian, Al Jazeera and elsewhere. He joined us on Notes from the World to discuss the current state of the Central American nation of Honduras under the rule of Xiomara Castro, its history and where it may be heading.

Steven Dudley is the co-founder and co-director of InSight Crime, a think tank and media organization that seeks to deepen and inform the debate about organized crime and citizen security in the Americas. He is the author of two books, MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang (HarperCollins, 2020) and Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia (Routledge 2004). He has reported from Latin America and the Caribbean for over two decades including from Colombia, Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti and from the subject our our conversation today, Guatemala. .

Last month, InSight Crime published an in-depth report examining how Guatemala’s President Bernardo Arévalo was faring in his fight against the deeply-entrenched and many-tentacled political-criminal monarchy that has scuttled the hopes many Guatemalans had for the country after the conclusion in 1996 of its thirty year civil war. Its assessment of where things stand was worrisome, to say the least.

Rafael Trelles was born in the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan in 1957 and began studying painting at the age of eleven under the instruction of Catalan painter Julio Yort. In 1980, Trelles graduated from the Universidad de Puerto Rico with a degree in Fine Arts, magna cum laude. In 1983, he pursued graduate studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). His work has been exhibited internationally including in New York, Florida, Mexico and in a major exhibition in 2018, Santurce, un libro mural, at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico. He resides and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico and I was happy to have the opportunity to speak with him regarding the trajectory of Puerto Rican art and the struggle to safeguard the island’s cultural heritage amid political and economic pressures.

Rayhan Asat was born in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, referred to by China, the political entity that governs it, as an autonomous region. Since 2014, the Chinese government has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against the Uyghurs - a Turkic Muslim ethnic group in Xinjiang - that have been documented to include mass arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, mass surveillance, cultural and religious persecution, family separation, forced labor and violations of reproductive rights. In August 2022, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a report looking at the treatment of Uyghurs and other largely Muslim groups in China which concluded the Chinese government’s actions “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”

An international human rights lawyer focusing on atrocity prevention, the rule of law, civil liberties and corporate accountability, Rayhan Asat previously advised the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and is currently a senior legal and policy advisor with the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council.

Ewald Scharfenberg is the founder of the Venezuelan investigative website Armando.Info. For more than a decade, the site has provided readers with a unique window into the workings of Venezuela's authoritarian regime and the toll its activities and abuses have taken on the country's population. Scharfenberg, editor Roberto Deniz, and two other Armando Info journalists fled Venezuela after the government persecuted them for their reporting on corruption in a state food distribution program. I spoke with him about Venezuela’s struggle to regain its democracy, the criminal nature of the Maduro regime, the shadowy figure of Alex Saab and the difficult reality of trying to practice journalism in today’s Venezuela.

[En español]

As we mark the 15th anniversary of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, this week on Notes from the World we speak with Louino Robillard, a Haitian social activist who was born in Saint-Raphaël, in Haiti’s north, and raised in Cité Soleil, one of the most populous neighborhoods of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and also one of its most deprived. The driving force behind a number of organizations in Haiti including the Konbit Solèy Leve, Konbit Bibliyotèk Site Solèy and Pak Nan Ginen, he focuses on peacebuilding initiatives in urban neighborhoods and on sustainable development in the Haitian countryside, with a particular focus on reforestation. He joins us today from Cap-Haïtien.

On this week’s episode of Notes from the World, we speak with David Frum, a Canadian-American political commentator and writer for The Atlantic, about what we can expect from the impending second presidential term of Donald Trump. A former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Frum is the author of several books, including Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy and Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic.