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Category Archives: Magazines
Pisco Shakedown
March 1, 2008
The basic story is disarmingly pat: on August 15, 2007, an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter Scale devastated Pisco, Peru, a city of 80,000 on the desert coast south of Lima. Around 520 deaths were reported. Fifty thousand became homeless. In newspapers around the world, this calamity ran as a few inches of print, and then disappeared.
But six months later, the disaster is not over. Rolling into town on an unkind February wind — a sea breeze both salty and dusty — I passed jagged ruins and fields of rubble. Hasty piles of brick, adobe and dust dotted the city. Even the beach was covered in it. Tents from aid agencies around the world filled the streets, along with Peruvian government earthquake shacks that looked like toolsheds, except less sturdy.
But in a yellow concrete house in a residential neighborhood, where intact buildings stood next to collapsed buildings, newly vacant lots and windblown reed-and-tarp shelters, I found a hopeful, even cheerful scene: the Pisco headquarters of Burners Without Borders.
Posted in Magazines, Whole Life Times
Lost in Translation No More
Jan 17th 2008 | GUADALAJARA
Sales of books in Spanish are booming, and there is plenty of room for growth
AT THE Feria Internacional del Libro (FIL), the largest Spanish-language publishing event, held a few weeks ago in Guadalajara, in Mexico, an eager teenager cadged your correspondent’s badge at the exit. That young people might want to sneak into book fairs would be the stuff of dreams in many countries, where competition from other media is pushing books aside. But as FIL demonstrates with more than 500,000 visitors, up by 7% from 2006, Spanish-language publishers, and readers, have much to celebrate.
Posted in Magazines, The Economist
Well Positioned
Dec 13th 2007 | VANCOUVER
Lululemon, a Canadian clothing firm, rides the yoga boom
IF THERE is no seaweed in a T-shirt, does it still reduce stress and make your skin feel softer? That was the worry that threatened to distract North America’s yoga practitioners from their routines last month. Shares in Lululemon Athletica, a Canadian firm that sells yoga clothing and equipment, fell after news reports claimed that tests had failed to find any trace of seaweed fibre in some of its garments, which were supposed to contain the stuff. Lululemon insisted that its own test results showed seaweed really was present, though it agreed (at the request of Canadian regulators) to withdraw unsubstantiated claims about its supposed therapeutic benefits.
Posted in Magazines, The Economist