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aprzhu.bsky.social
april zhu
@aprzhu.bsky.social
570 followers 250 following 84 posts
writer, editor, painter, mad
www.aprzhu.com
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aprzhu.bsky.social
Quote: "An omnipresent feature of liberal chronicles of the occupation is a fixation on how much was wasted: the $2.13 trillion spent and the 176,000 people who died. Surveying the destruction wreaked on Afghanistan, these accounts conclude, unsurprisingly, that the war was a total failure. The Taliban are once again in control of Kabul. Al Qaeda runs gold mines in Badakhshan and Takhar provinces. The Afghan army is a distant memory. This humiliation is often presented as a mystery. How could so much money—more than was spent on the Marshall Plan—and “goodwill,” in the New Yorker’s words, have achieved so little? But the occupation succeeded! Every military failure was a triumph. Behind every botched mission was someone getting paid; more failures meant more opportunities to profit."
September 14, 2025 at 2:35 PM
aprzhu.bsky.social
Wrote a micro-review on the film Black Tea (2024) in
@thedrift-mag.bsky.social
www.thedriftmag.com/mentions/
Black Tea (film). In acclaimed Timbuktu director Abderrahmane Sissako’s latest feature, Aya leaves her unfaithful fiancé at the altar in West Africa for a new, emancipated life in Guangzhou. Here, the “Chocolate City,” so called for its large African émigré population, is scrubbed of complexity: no one speaks Cantonese, but foreigners all know HSK 4 Mandarin; cops are cool; Chinese antiblackness never infringes on the personal lives of the film’s invariably friendly, reasonable characters. Aya’s love interest, who owns the boutique tea shop where she works, dotingly calls her “Black Tea,” a nickname no Chinese person would ever come up with because even Google Translate knows that black tea in Mandarin is “hong cha” (“red tea”). It is not races that fall in love but real people, and unfortunately, Black Tea has none of those.
July 1, 2025 at 7:55 AM
aprzhu.bsky.social
showyourstripes.info/c/africa/ken...
Temperature change in Kenya from 1901 to 2024
June 21, 2025 at 8:24 PM
aprzhu.bsky.social
If you're in Nairobi this May Day, join us at MacMillan Library to meet some of the workers featured on the podcast and learn more about the budding AI workers' movements in Kenya!
April 25, 2025 at 8:54 AM
aprzhu.bsky.social
The table of contents of proceedings of the First Colloquium on American Studies in Eastern Africa, held at the University of Nairobi in 1990
October 23, 2024 at 5:21 AM
aprzhu.bsky.social
im in my roller girl eraaaaaa!!!! 😤😤😤
September 19, 2023 at 4:15 AM
aprzhu.bsky.social
ok how does bluesky already know this
August 20, 2023 at 9:09 AM