A real magic carpet story: transforming 28,000 lives with $200

By Esha Chhabra, TakePart

Chhote Lal and Kanni Devi are perched behind a loom, weaving rugs in the courtyard of their two-room home in Nareth, Rajasthan, a rural village on the outskirts of Jaipur, India.

Devi has a wide, captivating smile accentuated by red lipstick, a new luxury in her life.

Lal, 40, and Devi, 35, have been weaving for Jaipur Rugs, India’s largest rug manufacturer, for more than 15 years. In 2013, they were selected as one of India’s best artisans by The Times of India. They were flown to Delhi, a first for the couple, and recognized for their skills. Devi points to a laminated copy of the article, which hangs in their living quarters. The title reads, “Carpet Weaver to Master Artisan.”

China: Fake It Till You Make It

Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman, Foreign Affairs

No one knows for sure why some societies are more innovative than others. The United States is a highly inventive society, the source of a host of technologies—the airplane, the atomic bomb, the Internet—that have transformed the world. Modern China, by contrast, is frequently criticized for its widespread copying of foreign inventions and creative works. Once the home of gunpowder, printing, and other transformational inventions, China is today better known for its knockoffs of almost every imaginable product: cars, clothes, computers, fast food, movies, pharmaceuticals, even entire European villages. The United States gave the world the iPhone; China gave it the HiPhone—a cheap facsimile of a groundbreaking American gadget.

The bipolar/Ritalin Scandal

The Real Biederman Scandal

By Jacob Azerrad, PhD

 The real scandal perpetrated by Biederman has nothing to do with his consulting fee shenanigans and everything to do with the real life (and death) consequences of the methods now used by modern pediatric psychiatry to tag normal childhood behaviors with diagnoses – like “childhood bipolar” -- and the pediatric medical profession’s complicit acquiescence to such malarkey.

Harvard Shrink Gets Rich Labeling Kids Bipolar

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet

    What Dick Cheney is to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, psychiatrist Joseph Biederman is to the explosion of psychiatric medications in American children. Recently, Biederman was nailed by congressional investigators and the New York Times for overestimating just how greedy an elite shrink is entitled to be.