Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

What?

• Museum of Chinese in America has a new, more mainstreamy, Maya-Lin-designed space. Yes, it's important. This makes MOCA one of only a few major Asian American museums in the country, and its previous space was teeny.

• Speaking of major Asian American museums, rock star Mike Shinoda gets to show his artwork at JANM again. Because he is a rock star. And JA. You see.

• A Pakistani American group "slams" the US Government for detaining "King of Bollywood" Sharukh Khan for over 2 hours in an airport, and other acts of racial profiling.

• Human interest story about Pinay White House Executive Chef Cristeta Pasia Comerford, who just won an award for being famous. Apparently, anything she cooks is Pinay because she is Pinay.

• 'Bama calms down pissed off immigration reform activists by talking to them in his sexy voice. They are pissed off because 'Bama and Janet promised immigration reform and have done it not.

• Good article in The American Muslim on media handling of Muslim domestic violence in the US:

In cases when white males perpetrate violence the focus is on the psychological portrait of this individual:  family history, childhood, mental health.  Yet when a Muslim woman is killed violently by a Muslim man, we are willing to accept culture as an explanation in a way that would never be satisfactory if the perpetrator were white, just as we tend to look for cultural explanations for teen pregnancy among blacks and Latinos but treat pregnant white teens as individual cases.

• Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh is pulled into the latest show-trial in Iran, the Ahmadinejad clean-up after the fraudulent-election protests earlier this year. Why a show trial? This American Life has a story about televised false confessions in Iran that may shed some light on Iran's weird media-psyche.

• And finally, Lois Ann Yamanaka checks in about the State of Hawaii's fiftieth birthday this month, and the real issues with 'Bama's citizenship.

I think that was very unemotional, don't you?