“In the bottom quartile of family incomes, only 9 percent of kids attain a college education,” Crow said about five minutes after I met him on Monday afternoon. “And, in the top quartile, 80 percent get a college education, regardless of academic ability.” That statistic is what he is trying to change.

Within hours on Monday of unveiling, with much fanfare, a program to pay employees’ college tuition, Starbucks faced criticism for drawbacks in the fine print — notably that students could have to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket, and wait months or years before being reimbursed.
A college junior or senior who qualified for full reimbursement would need to earn 21 credits from Arizona State University’s online programs, out of 120 needed for a bachelor’s degree, before receiving any tuition reimbursement.

BEIJING — On a spring evening in 1989, with the student occupation of Tiananmen Square entering its second month and the Chinese leadership unnerved and divided, top army commanders were summoned to headquarters to pledge their support for the use of military force to quash the protests.
One refused.
In a stunning rebuke to his superiors, Maj. Gen. Xu Qinxian, leader of the mighty 38th Group Army, said the protests were a political problem and should be settled through negotiations, not force, according to new accounts of his actions from researchers who interviewed him.

Đại diện Sở VH-TT&DL TP.HCM cho rằng: trên thực tế, ít người trong ngành hiểu về bản quyền chứ đừng nói đến người ngoài. Hiện nay, không mấy người có ý thức về việc tôn trọng quyền tác giả và quyền liên quan. Đại diện phía Bộ Công an chia sẻ: Chúng ta tuyên truyền rất nhiều nhưng không biết tuyên truyền có đến tai người cần không. Nhiều người sử dụng máy tính không có chút ý thức gì về bản quyền.

Vấn đề nổi cộm bấy lâu nay, gây khó cho tổ chức bảo vệ quyền của các nhạc sĩ vẫn là thủ tục xin cấp phép gửi lên cơ quan quản lý không cần bao gồm giấy chứng nhận đã thực hiện nghĩa vụ quyền tác giả. Khi đã được Cục NTBD hoặc các Sở VHTT&DL “cấp phép”, nghiễm nhiên nhà tổ chức ca nhạc đã đủ điều kiện pháp lý để tiến hành hoạt động của họ. Việc xin phép tác giả và chủ sở hữu quyền theo luật Sở hữu Trí tuệ VN cũng như công ước quốc tế quy định không còn là điều kiện hiển nhiên và bắt buộc.

Dear Colleagues:

I would like to share the news that Sarah Grant successfully defended her PhD dissertation in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Riverside last week. The title of her dissertation is "On Culprits and Crisis: Branding Vietnam in the Global Coffee Industry." Below is an abstract:

Vietnam is the largest exporter of Robusta coffee beans in the world, making the industry a pillar of Vietnam’s post 1980’s market transformation and two-decades of remarkable economic growth. Yet Robusta coffee production is also a primary conduit of risk and uncertainty for the Vietnamese economy generally and acutely so for individual producers, collectors, and traders. Meanwhile, though Vietnamese coffee is starkly visible as a global commodity, it remains invisible in global consumption markets. Through the lens of these contradictions, this dissertation offers an ethnography of the Vietnamese coffee industry, framed as a transnational site of knowledge production constituted through risk, uncertainty, and value. Grounded in twenty-four months of ethnographic research in the central highlands coffee growing region, it offers an analysis of the modes of power through which knowledge about global industrial commodity markets is accessed and exchanged. The coffee market, I contend, is constituted through both real and imagined, local and global spaces of encounter. As such, I take certification schemes, quality control and auditing procedures, and geographical indexing rights related to branding and trademarks as my key sites of ethnographic engagement. Here the economic logic that guides international and domestic investors commingles with local knowledge, historical experience, and ambiguity, at once defining and redefining the industrial coffee market itself. As Vietnam’s remarkable economic growth stagnates, the economic landscape of the market-socialist state reveals the tendencies of local, state, and transnational actors to engage with this market. I explicate how, in the wake of the 2001-02 coffee crisis and as global coffee producers move beyond it, Vietnamese farmers and traders directly engage with the economic logic and language of crisis, though they do so, again, with the label of “culprit” looming ever-present.

Sarah also recently accepted a position as the Luce Foundation - ASIANetwork postdoctoral fellow of Southeast Asian Studies at Hendrix College.

Congratulations Sarah!


Christina Schwenkel
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
Graduate Advisor, Southeast Asian Studies (SEATRiP)
University of California, Riverside
900 University Avenue
Riverside, CA 92521 USA

“I wanted to put a stake in the ground and show support for the humanities at Yale,” Mr. Iseman said in a statement. He added that as a former English major, he believed that an endowed professorship of poetry was something the university needed, not least because Oxford has had one since 1708

Ukraine is struggling with how to deal with a declining Russia that is looking for dignity in all the wrong places — like in Crimea — and Vietnam is struggling with how to deal with a rising China that is looking for oil in all the wrong places — like in Vietnam’s territorial waters. Russia’s attitude toward Ukraine has been: “Marry me, or I’ll kill you.” And China’s toward Vietnam has been a variation of that line from “There Will Be Blood”: “I have a long straw, so I think I’ll drink my milkshake and yours.”

Whether it’s the roar of motorbikes, the near constant opening of bars and restaurants, the chatty nature of its inhabitants, or the abundance of great coffee, there’s just something invigorating about Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest metropolis. It’s no surprise that Saigon, as most locals call it, exudes a youthful, inventive energy — after all, over half of its eight million dwellers are younger than 35. This dynamic spirit shines through in quirky cafes, innovative cuisine and boutiques selling homegrown fashion. And when you need a breather from all that’s new and fabulous, it’s easy to steal quiet moments in crumbling colonial buildings and contemplative art spaces.

And The Square People are only getting more numerous and empowered. “Our goal is that, in three years, every Vietnamese will own a smartphone,” Nguyen Manh Hung, who leads the Viettel Group, a Vietnamese telecom, told me. “We are now manufacturing a smartphone for less than $40 and our goal is $35. We charge $2 a month for Internet connection for a P.C. and $2.50 for voice from a smartphone.” Because the Vietnamese media is tightly censored, it is no accident that 22 million of Vietnam’s 90 million people are on Facebook. Just two years ago there were only 8 million. Vietnam has about 100,000 students studying abroad; a decade ago it was a tenth of that. All future Square People.