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The first myth of coffee is the myth of its origin about 1500 years ago in Abyssinia, in what is now Ethiopia. A goatherd named Kaldi is said to have noticed his goats dancing with extra energy. He also noticed that they were eating the fruit of some tall shrubs, so he chewed on them, got energized, and the rest is history. Coffee: Fruit to grounds The rest is also geography -- the Abyssinians only got as far as mashing the fruit into something like a power bar; it was across the Red Sea in Yemen that coffee as we know it began to emerge about a century later. The second coffee myth comes much later, in the 1970s, and it actually includes the word "second." The myth goes like this: Myth: Coffee is the second-most actively traded commodity, after oil. This is a myth that I have repeated online, in classes, and in public lectures. I have read it on coffee web sites and many kinds of books about the beverage. And I have heard it in almost every documentary film about coffee tha

If I am in my car, I am almost certainly listening to public radio. We live in a place where thoughtful stories and interviews from NPR, PRI, APR, or BBC are available on one local station or another almost all the time. Recently I heard a few minutes near the end of this conversation with Salma Hayek. We had heard a little about Hayek's latest film, in which she is an ordinary, working person who finds herself at a small dinner party with economically powerful -- ruthless, even -- guests in the home of one of her massage/reiki clients. This is the sort of film that we would usually just put on our list for eventual release online, but in part because of the interview, I joined Pam in wanting to catch it in the theater. During travel to visit family in Maryland, we did just that. Beatriz at Dinner She was invited but not welcome This film can be seen as a sort of sequel to the T.C. Boyle novel Tortilla Curtain , which treats very similar tensions between people who are physically p

Good writing is the best evidence of clear thinking. Good writing is also hard work. from   Not-the-13th Grade I wrote this aphorism myself more than 20 years ago. I had said it to a class, and then realized that it should be at the top of the  writing page s I had created as part of my very first web site. My entire online life began, in fact, with this small effort to help my geography students to think more critically about their own writing. I was reminded of this when my  favorite librarian  shared Dave Stuart's recent article, " Writing: The Most Underrated Twenty-First Century Skill ," which she had found through one of her librarian newsletters. I flinched momentarily at his use of the phrase " most  underrated," but quickly realized he is absolutely right. Education is full of fads, and an increasingly consequential constellation of fads surrounds efforts to figure out what employers want from graduates and then to make damn sure we educators "give

One of my proudest moments as an academic came during a panel discussion on fair trade in 2013, when the economist sitting next to me wrote "pink unicorn" in her notebook, exclaiming that she would be borrowing my metaphor for her own teaching. This was especially gratifying to me, because I see almost the entire field of economics as deluded by its fixation on free markets. What the Free Market looks like. I recently became aware of Chris Floyd's short, brilliant, and important 2008 article, The God That Failed  that sheds important light on how damaging that fixation has become, and how so many people have been taken in by it. Writing just after the bubble burst (and coincidentally, shortly before I started blogging), Floyd explains how the simplistic pronouncements of Thatcher, Reagan, and Norquist became deeply embedded in our politics over the previous three decades, normalizing the impoverishment of public institutions. As dire as his words were in 2008, he could no

Dalia & Bashir As I have written in this space before, Sandy Tolan's novel*  The Lemon Tree  has been among the most powerful works I have assigned to my students. In my survey course The Developing World, I assign it to complement the traditional textbook chapter on the Middle East. I intended to assign this only once -- during the semester that it was our town and university community read, in which Mr. Tolan visited our campus. But the writing that resulted from this assignment was among the most thoughtful writing I have seen from my students, so I have continued to assign it. The conflict over Palestine is one of the most important for U.S. foreign policy, but one that is little understood by most U.S. citizens, and understood in only the simplest terms by most of the rest. It is, of course, a conflict with a complicated geography and  a complicated history, and both have implications for daily life in the West Bank and throughout the entire region. So while a few studen