Alidad Vassigh

Born in Tehran, educated in Britain and France, I have been a freelance translator since the late 1990s.

Alidad Vassigh

See more by Alidad Vassigh

Journalism teacher and his students in University of Barcelona.

AI Is Good For Education — And Bad For Teachers Who Teach Like Machines

Despite fears of AI upending the education and the teaching profession, artificial education will be an extremely valuable tool to free up teachers from rote exercises to focus on the uniquely humanistic part of learning.

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ - Early in 2023, Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates included teaching among the professions most threatened by Artificial Intelligence (AI), arguing that a robot could, in principle, instruct as well as any school-teacher. While Gates is an undoubted expert in his field, one wonders how much he knows about teaching.

As an avowed believer in using technology to improve student results, Gates has argued for teachers to use more tech in classrooms, and to cut class sizes. But schools and countries that have followed his advice, pumping money into technology at school, or students who completed secondary schooling with the backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have not attained the superlative results expected of the Gates recipe.

Thankfully, he had enough sense to add some nuance to his views, instead suggesting changes to teacher training that he believes could improve school results.

I agree with his view that AI can be a big and positive contributor to schooling. Certainly, technological changes prompt unease and today, something tremendous must be afoot if a leading AI developer, Geoffrey Hinton, has warned of its threat to people and society.

But this isn't the first innovation to upset people. Over 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Socrates wondered, in the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, whether reading and writing wouldn't curb people's ability to reflect and remember. Writing might lead them to despise memory, he observed. In the 18th and 19th centuries, English craftsmen feared the machines of the Industrial Revolution would destroy their professions, producing lesser-quality items faster, and cheaper.

Their fears were not entirely unfounded, but it did not happen quite as they predicted. Many jobs disappeared, but others emerged and the majority of jobs evolved. Machines caused a fundamental restructuring of labor at the time, and today, AI will likely do the same with the modern workplace.

Many predicted that television, computers and online teaching would replace teachers, which has yet to happen. In recent decades, teachers have banned students from using calculators to do sums, insisting on teaching arithmetic the old way. It is the same dry and mechanical approach to teaching which now wants to keep AI out of the classroom.

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Society

Sleep Divorce: The Benefits For Couples In Having Separate Beds

Sleeping separately is often thought to be the beginning of the end for a loving couple. But studies show that having permanently separate beds — if you have the space and means — can actually reinforce the bonds of a relationship.

BUENOS AIRES — Couples, it is assumed, sleep together — and sleeping apart is easily taken as a sign of a relationship gone cold. But several recent studies are suggesting, people sleep better alone and "sleep divorce," as the habit is being termed, can benefit both a couple's health and intimacy.

That is, if you have the space for it...

While sleeping in separate beds is seen as unaffectionate and the end of sex, psychologist María Gabriela Simone told Clarín this "is not a fashion, but to do with being able to feel free, and to respect yourself and your partner."

She says the marriage bed originated "in the matrimonial duty of sharing a bed with the aim of having sex to procreate." That, she adds, gradually settled the idea that people "who love each other sleep together."

Is it an imposition then, or an overwhelming preference? Simone says intimacy is one thing, sleeping another.

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A black and white image of a woman looking at a memorial wall in Argentina.

Society

How Argentina Is Changing Tactics To Combat Gender Violence

Argentina has tweaked its protocols for responding to sexual and domestic violence. It hopes to encourage victims to report crimes and reveal information vital to a prosecution.

BUENOS AIRES - In the first three months of 2023, Argentina counted 116 killings of women, transvestites and trans-people, according to a local NGO, Observatorio MuMaLá. They reveal a pattern in these killings, repeated every year: most femicides happen at home, and 70% of victims were protected in principle by a restraining order on the aggressor.

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Now, legal action against gender violence, which must begin with a formal complaint to the police, has a crucial tool — the Protocol for the Investigation and Litigation of Cases of Sexual Violence (Protocolo de investigación y litigio de casos de violencia sexual). The protocol was recommended by the acting head of the state prosecution service, Eduardo Casal, and laid out by the agency's Specialized Prosecution Unit for Violence Against Women (UFEM).

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food / travel

Meet Blanca Alsogaray, The First Woman To Win Cuba's "Oscar Of Cigars"

For the first time, Cuba's prestigious annual cigar festival recognized a woman, Alsogaray, owner of an iconic cigar shop in Buenos Aires, as the top representative of this celebrated lifeline of the Cuban economy.

BUENOS AIRES — Cigars are traditionally reserved for a man's world. But this year, for the first time, a Latin American woman has won one of three awards given at the 23rd Habano Festival in Cuba.

Every year since 2000, the Festival has gathered the top players in the world of Cuban cigars including sellers, distributors, specialists and aficionados. A prize is given to an outstanding personality in one of three areas: production, communication and sales. The latter went to Blanca Alsogaray, owner of the Buenos Aires shop La Casa del Habano. She says these prizes are not unlike the "Oscars of cigars."

"It's a sexist world for sure, but I won," she said of a prize which was called "Habano Man" (Hombre habano) until this year, when the word was changed for her.

"It recognizes a lifetime's work, which I consider so important as Argentina isn't an easy place for business, and less so being a woman." She was competing with two men. "In truth," she added. "I really do deserve it."

Alsogaray opened her shop in 1993. At the time there were only two sellers anywhere of Cuba's premium, hand-rolled cigars, the other one being in Mexico. Now habanos are sold in 150 outlets worldwide. "I want to celebrate these 30 years, and the prize. We're going to have a big party," she said. The firm celebrated its 30th anniversary on May 16.

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Photo of U.S President Joe Biden with Custom and Border Patrol officers during a visit to the border wall along the Rio Grande,

Geopolitics

Migrants, Fentanyl, Cartel Violence: U.S. And Mexico Must Both Rethink The Border

Mexico and the United States must collaborate to tackle a dual problem of violence and drug use hurting their countries.But first, they must stop playing the blame game.

-OpEd-

MEXICO CITY — An unstoppable force is about to smash into an immovable object. The fentanyl crisis in the United States has become, beyond the reach of any single election, a vital threat to its society. And while the key to the problem, as with all narcotics abuse, is around consumption, Mexico can hardly absolve itself of responsibility when the fentanyl is sourced here. Moreover, it is connected to our own, massive crime problem.

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All of this means that there is yet another reason for authorities on both sides of the border to help each other.

I am reminded of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, set in the French Revolution. Dickens mocks the French revolutionaries who claim to be fighting for liberty while decapitating all and sundry.

Likewise there's no squaring safe streets in Mexico with a drug epidemic next door: drugs like fentanyl finance the cartels that terrorize Mexican cities and neighborhoods. Or put another way: Drugs sold in the United States pay for the guns they fire at Mexicans!

Not surprisingly perhaps, given his irrepressible optimism, Mexico's president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, rejects both components of the problem. He says no fentanyl is made in Mexico and crime here is under check, which would mean people are deluded in both countries.

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Society

How This Colombian "Throuple" Made Social And Legal History

The throuple of three gay men married together has challenged the standard vision of a family in traditionally conservative Colombia.

MEDELLÍN — In 1999, Colombians Manuel José Bermúdez Andrade and Alejandro Rodríguez Ramírez met and began a loving relationship. They barely imagined their soon-to-evolve couple would come to alter perspectives on what constitutes a family in their conservative homeland. In 2003, they met Álex Esneyder Zabala, and soon formed a ménage à trois.

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The arrangement was a working example of polyamory — a word unfamiliar to them in those years. In 2012, the trio became a quartet, as they opened their household to Víctor Hugo Prada Ardila. Sadly for them, Alex died a year later (or in 2014) of cancer, leaving again a family of three.

They recently spoke about their 20 years together in the Colombian city of Medellín. Manuel said that being older when he met Alejandro in 1999, he insisted from the start that he did not expect Alejandro "to deprive himself" of encounters.

Manuel says he has always been "very free in terms of sexuality... it seemed unfair he should deprive himself of the pleasures of the flesh" by being locked up in monogamy early in life. "Your body is yours, you can enjoy it, it's not my property. And if you meet someone and feel more than just desire, if it's love, we'll talk about it and see what happens," he says he told Alejandro.

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A pedestrian walks past the American luxury jewellery company Tiffany & Co store in Hong Kong.

Geopolitics

The Rise Of China Does Nothing To Fix What's Wrong With The West

The West and its brand of modernity may be waning in favor of an ascendant China, but is it offering anything besides replacing market forces with brute force.

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — It's a bedlam out there. We can feel around us the dissolution of all that seemed, just yesterday, so solid and permanent.

Some say the West is in decline, in a process that began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the United States burst onto the stage before compounding its power after 1945. It put an end to the last days of Europe's imperial splendor.

Observing events today, we may feel that the American years were in fact the West's last, magnificent chapter, and the East is regaining a long-lost supremacy, reshaped this time by communist China.

The American Way of Life, as that shallow version of Western civilization is called, barely had time to mature and define itself. It simply appeared as the rule of materialism and economic power, with a motto to chase money at any cost, even at the expense of living a life.

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Ideas

Are Humans Inherently Evil? History Says No

People's deplorable actions ultimately have more to do with socially induced fears and mistrust than some inherent evil. Fiction and tradition tells us humans are fundamentally wicked, but history says otherwise.

-Essay-

BUENOS AIRES — In June 1965, six boys from St. Andrew's College, an Anglican boarding school in the South Pacific island of Tonga, stole a boat, filled it with snacks and set out to sea in search of adventures.

They wanted to reach Fiji, although none had even considered bringing a compass. The oldest was barely 15 years old. The boys fell asleep and woke up in a storm.

After spending eight days adrift, they spotted a rocky isle, with no idea where they were. It wasn't even an isle, so much as an islet, just a bit of rock. They landed and lit a fire, working to keep it alive until rescued, just like the boys in William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies. In that novel, as we know, the castaways abandon their civilized ways and turn on each other, causing three deaths.

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Image of Brazilian President Lula holding a microphone and speaking at a seminar.

Geopolitics

Why Lula Is Doubling Down On His Ambiguous Stance On Russia And China

Though he campaigned for his return to the Brazilian presidency as a pro-Western reformer, since coming into office Lula da Silva has reverted to the classic positioning of a 20th century Latin American leftist.

-Analysis-

BRASÍLIA — One hundred days into his third presidential term, Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has made the war in distant Ukraine into his government's cause célèbre. Observers like The Economist are wondering if this is because of diplomacy or naivety — or both.

Why, one wonders, has Brazil's socialist president waded into the Ukrainian quagmire, inclining toward the Russian version of events? Lula says he is restoring Brazil to its proper place in world affairs, which it enjoyed 20 years ago in his first two terms. Nostalgia — or a glamorizing vision of those days — is perhaps blinding him to the pitfalls of today. Domestic challenges could soon make him even less perceptive.

Lula was elected over his right-wing predecessor Jair Bolsonaro by a tiny margin, as shown by the fact that he lacks a parliamentary majority and works with a center-right cabinet. He can be said to have been chosen simply as a less radical option, as the middle class tired of Bolsonaro's antics, fanaticism and misogyny. While campaigning, Lula seemed to have understood that Brazilians did not want a 20th-century-style, leftist leader.

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Image of singer Romeo Santos singing on stage.

Society

Toxic Salsa: When Latin Romance Music Glorifies Sexist Violence

Male dominance and violence is often encouraged in popular Latin American music, and particularly in genres like salsa or bachata. The more memorable the songs, the bigger the harm they will have done to generations of women.

BOGOTÁ — In Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America, misogyny is often deeply rooted in culture — and that means in popular music too.

In the romantic world of Salsa music, lyrics can reveal sexist attitudes and provide clues as to what some men are thinking when they lash out.

Colombia's state prosecution service registered almost 48,000 cases of domestic violence in 2022, or 128 every day. These cases include 614 women murdered by partners or former partners — sometimes for having dared to reject them — as well as horrific acid attacks. They are the fruit of a culture that believes women do not control their own lives, but instead belong to men.

In a recent open letter to President Gustavo Petro, a group of artists called for socio-cultural change, focusing particularly on children and young people.

When we listen to music we love, we often barely listen to the lyrics and what they may teach. All our lives, we've listened and danced to so many songs without considering how they degrade women. As I have written before, critical reading of texts and discourses isn't our forte in Colombia. But we can and should start listening critically to many songs that should never have been written, sung or danced to.

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January 23, 2023, Maracaibo, Venezuela: Thousands of Venezuelans join to protest against the government of Nicolas Maduro to demand salary increases and celebrate the anniversary of the end of the dictatorship

Economy

The Venezuela Bogeyman, How Fear Of Socialism Thwarts Latin American Progress

Like fears of communist subversion during the Cold War, claims that the Left will destroy the economy and end freedom persist in Latin American elections, in spite of their ridiculousness.

-OpEd-

BOGOTÁ -- It must be Latin America's favorite warning. Every time there's an election, conservatives warn "socialism" is coming — and not just any socialism, but the Venezuelan variety! A vote for this or that candidate, they say, will turn the country into a land bereft of freedoms and prosperity.

Claims like these helped thwart a first presidential bid by Mexico's Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2006. The opposition said he had contacts with Venezuela's then-ruler, Hugo Chávez, and even forceful denials could notdampen the fear of a communist president. The warnings were repeated in 2018 , to little effect as López Obrador was elected, and again in 2021, when former president Vicente Fox called him López Chávez.

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Photo of María Antonia de Paz y Figueroa

Society

Mama Antula's Moment? An 18th-Century Feminist May Be The Next Catholic Saint

The Vatican may soon canonize the Mama Antula, an Argentine woman who started a spiritual movement at a time when religious intellectualism was strictly the domain the men.

BUENOS AIRES — The Vatican is studying the canonization of Mama Antula, an 18th century woman from northern Argentina who broke the rules to practice Christian spirituality. At the time, this was understood to be a job for the clergy and for men.

Some see her as an early defender of women's rights — and of the poor — in the Americas. She is also being hailed as the first "feminist" who would become a Catholic saint.

On March 7, Pope Francis declared "the time is very close when she could be a saint." The Pope, himself another Argentine, is an admirer of Mama Antula. When he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, he said "this woman is worth gold."

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Alidad Vassigh

Despite fears of AI upending the education and the teaching profession, artificial education will be an extremely valuable tool to free up teachers from rote exercises to focus on the uniquely humanistic part of learning.

A passionate teacher is irreplaceable

Teachers to teach

Sleeping separately is often thought to be the beginning of the end for a loving couple. But studies show that having permanently separate beds — if you have the space and means — can actually reinforce the bonds of a relationship.

Harm of bad nights' sleep

The importance of flexibility

Argentina has tweaked its protocols for responding to sexual and domestic violence. It hopes to encourage victims to report crimes and reveal information vital to a prosecution.

A complicated justice system

Different factors

For the first time, Cuba's prestigious annual cigar festival recognized a woman, Alsogaray, owner of an iconic cigar shop in Buenos Aires, as the top representative of this celebrated lifeline of the Cuban economy.

Childhood aroma

My vocation

Mexico and the United States must collaborate to tackle a dual problem of violence and drug use hurting their countries.But first, they must stop playing the blame game.

Social problems

Two predicaments

The throuple of three gay men married together has challenged the standard vision of a family in traditionally conservative Colombia.

Manuel, Alejandro and Víctor

Breaking the mold

The West and its brand of modernity may be waning in favor of an ascendant China, but is it offering anything besides replacing market forces with brute force.

Business infects religion

A new "Chinese era"?

People's deplorable actions ultimately have more to do with socially induced fears and mistrust than some inherent evil. Fiction and tradition tells us humans are fundamentally wicked, but history says otherwise.

Human kind

Lord of the Flies (1990)

The "nocebo" effect

Though he campaigned for his return to the Brazilian presidency as a pro-Western reformer, since coming into office Lula da Silva has reverted to the classic positioning of a 20th century Latin American leftist.

China, the main target

Wasted diplomatic chances

Nuclear submarines and factories

Male dominance and violence is often encouraged in popular Latin American music, and particularly in genres like salsa or bachata. The more memorable the songs, the bigger the harm they will have done to generations of women.

#1: "If I Catch You" by Ismael Rivera

#2: "Women Are" by Ismael Miranda, and "Indecent Proposal" by Romeo Santos

#3: "Bad Woman," by the Sonora Matancera

#4: Roberto Cantoral's "Prisoner Number Nine"

#5 and more...

Like fears of communist subversion during the Cold War, claims that the Left will destroy the economy and end freedom persist in Latin American elections, in spite of their ridiculousness.

Venezuela's unique disaster

The Vatican may soon canonize the Mama Antula, an Argentine woman who started a spiritual movement at a time when religious intellectualism was strictly the domain the men.

Spiritual retreats

Path to canonization

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