Lazo Magazine

29/06/2024

Learn all about the newest up and coming neighborhood in Athens, Greece

The neighborhood of Kypseli is experiencing a resurgence in popularity. That's partly thanks to rising housing costs in central Athens, which led residents from other parts of the city to rediscover this once-popular Athenian enclave. The main pedestrian thoroughfare of Fokionos Negri is teeming wit

28/06/2024

The cyberpartisans of Belarus are the new face of the resistance to Lukashenko's regime:

By now, I imagine most of you know about the Cyber Partisans, a group of Belarussian hackers who recently took control of the country's railway to slow down the Russian troops flowing into the country for military exercises. The group announced it would return the railway's network to “normal mode...

25/06/2024

We should all visit the Sibundoy Valley:

I spent three months conducting anthropological research in the Sibundoy Valley, a verdant basin nestled between the Andes and the Amazon in southwest Colombia. There, the Indigenous cultures of the Kamëntšá and Inga peoples coexist alongside the majority mestizo population and an influx of forei...

25/06/2024

On the Iranian community that you've never heard of:

This interview was originally published on January 23, 2022, in Lazo Magazine's weekly newsletter. It's a conversation between Lazo Magazine's founder and Editor-In-Chief, Cristina Maza, and Rahim Hamid, an Ahwazi writer and human rights activist currently living in exile. The opinions expressed her

23/06/2024

Do the Roma of Eastern Europe deserve reparations?

Margareta Matache is from a Roma family in Romania. In the early 1990s, following the fall of communism in Romania, her father began working as an activist in the local Roma movement. Activists gathered in her home near Romania's capital Bucharest and listened to stories of the violence and discrimi

22/06/2024

Serbia is a destination for migrant workers.

I’m speaking to Stefan Vladisavljev, an expert on Chinese influence in the Western Balkans at the Belgrade Fund for Political Excellence. We discuss the harrowing story of Vietnamese workers who were exploited and abused by a Chinese company in Serbia and what this case tells us about internationa...

21/06/2024

Migrants in France are dying to leave

The Calais 'jungle,' a makeshift encampment housing thousands of migrants trying to make the journey from Northern France to the United Kingdom, sprang up around five years ago, at the height of Europe's migrant crisis. And although authorities have attempted to crack down on smuggling groups and di

18/06/2024

The world can be dangerous for religious minorities in Russia's backyard

In 2017, Russia outlawed the Jehovah's Witnesses, a Christian denomination founded in the United States in 1872, and branded them as extremists. There are estimated to be almost 200,000 practicing Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia, but some have started to flee due to persecution over the past five year

18/06/2024

This is how the European parliament is fighting corruption:

I'm speaking with a 37-year-old Green Party member of the European Parliament, Daniel Freund. He came on my radar after arguing that the European Union's infringement proceedings against Poland don't go far enough. We talked about everything from democratic backsliding in Europe to corruption. Here'

17/06/2024

This is what it's like to work for a superpower:

In 2001, mere months before the infamous September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States, the German newspaper editor Josef Joffe argued that America's soft power “rules over an empire on which the sun never sets.” That phrase has been used throughout history to describe empires or great p...

16/06/2024

Kazakhstan's hippest furniture designer

I sat down to speak with Nissa Kinzhalina, a 31-year-old Kazakh furniture designer based in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Nissa got married last month (congratulations!) and decided to create her own wedding dress and saukele, the traditional headdress of Kazakh brides.

15/06/2024

Parenting in rural Southeast Asia just got a lot easier

When Ngoc Nguyen was pregnant with her first child in 2016, a doctor monitored her and the baby. Nevertheless, she worried about whether she was doing the right things for a healthy pregnancy. “I read books, but a lot of information came in at once, so I felt more confused and stressed,” Ngoc s

14/06/2024

Berlin. Enough said.

A group of friends went to Berlin for a long weekend in November. There are some trips that are just short reprieves that quickly fade from memory. And then others should feel short because they are, yet are somehow so meaningful that they completely alter your state of mind. They pull you out o

11/06/2024

This South American country is all about the K-pop:

On the weekends, the streets of the financial district in Santiago de Chile typically lie deserted, and the towering office skyscrapers adorned with tall glass windows dim their lights until the humdrum of Monday morning resumes. But since the COVID-19 lockdowns ended, the area has unexpectedly

11/06/2024

The tropical oasis of Zanzibar has a dark history

Zanzibar is a tropical oasis shaped by migration and multiculturalism. A group of islands off mainland Tanzania, with two large islands called Pemba and Unguja, Zanzibar has a 20,000-year-old history that brought both progress and oppression to the archipelago. For centuries, Africans, Arabs, Eu

10/06/2024

Slovakia is headed in a troublesome direction

Russia may have scored another victory in Europe. And it wasn’t in Ukraine. On Saturday, April 6, nationalist candidate Peter Pelligrini won Slovakia’s presidential election, cementing the pro-Russian government’s power. Slovakia is a tiny Central Eastern European country with just over 5 mi

09/06/2024

Women are the answer

In the Gurage Zone of central Ethiopia, a new movement is emerging, orchestrated not by political leaders or wealthy elites but by the willful spirit of rural women. In this part of the Ethiopian highlands, most people rely on agriculture to make a living. Many devote significant tracks of their

08/06/2024

Meet the most up and coming neighborhood in Greece's capital

The neighborhood of Kypseli is experiencing a resurgence in popularity. That's partly thanks to rising housing costs in central Athens, which led residents from other parts of the city to rediscover this once-popular Athenian enclave. The main pedestrian thoroughfare of Fokionos Negri is teeming wit

07/06/2024

Greece's newest hotspot

The neighborhood of Kypseli is experiencing a resurgence in popularity. That's partly thanks to rising housing costs in central Athens, which led residents from other parts of the city to rediscover this once-popular Athenian enclave. The main pedestrian thoroughfare of Fokionos Negri is teeming wit

04/06/2024

K-pop is everywhere

On the weekends, the streets of the financial district in Santiago de Chile typically lie deserted, and the towering office skyscrapers adorned with tall glass windows dim their lights until the humdrum of Monday morning resumes. But since the COVID-19 lockdowns ended, the area has unexpectedly

03/06/2024

In this dispatch from Santiago, Charis McGowan reports on why South Korea's K-pop culture has become a sensation in Chile

https://lazomagazine.com/in-chile-k-pop-dance-groups-are-wildly-popular/

On the weekends, the streets of the financial district in Santiago de Chile typically lie deserted, and the towering office skyscrapers adorned with tall glass windows dim their lights until the humdrum of Monday morning resumes. But since the COVID-19 lockdowns ended, the area has unexpectedly

02/06/2024

In this dispatch from Santiago, Charis McGowan reports on why South Korea's K-pop culture has become a sensation in Chile

On the weekends, the streets of the financial district in Santiago de Chile typically lie deserted, and the towering office skyscrapers adorned with tall glass windows dim their lights until the humdrum of Monday morning resumes. But since the COVID-19 lockdowns ended, the area has unexpectedly

01/06/2024

Rowan Glass spent months in Colombia's Sibundoy Valley, a verdant basin nestled between the Andes and the Amazon. He reports on how the Indigenous cultures of the Kamëntšá and Inga peoples coexist alongside the majority mestizo population and an influx of foreign visitors.

I spent three months conducting anthropological research in the Sibundoy Valley, a verdant basin nestled between the Andes and the Amazon in southwest Colombia. There, the Indigenous cultures of the Kamëntšá and Inga peoples coexist alongside the majority mestizo population and an influx of forei...

31/05/2024

In this dispatch from Kashmir, Junaid Kathju reports on the Burusho people, the exiled descendants of a once-great royal family.

Wearing a white pheran — a long woolen cloak — and holding behind it a hot coal earthen pot known as a Kangri, 74-year-old Raja Jahangir Ali looks like any other Kashmiri. But when he asks his daughter to bring a cup of tea for the guests, he speaks in a foreign language, giving a hint of his un

28/05/2024

An intimate glimpse into Lazo Magazine's recent trip to Berlin.

https://lazomagazine.com/berlin-an-authentic-view-of-germanys-capital/

28/05/2024

In this new dispatch for Lazo Magazine, Mwende Mutuli Musau explores how Tanzania's fraught history created today's multicultural tourist oasis

Zanzibar is a tropical oasis shaped by migration and multiculturalism. A group of islands off mainland Tanzania, with two large islands called Pemba and Unguja, Zanzibar has a 20,000-year-old history that brought both progress and oppression to the archipelago. For centuries, Africans, Arabs, Eu

27/05/2024

Why is K-pop so popular in Latin America? Charis McGowan explores the emergence of K-pop dance groups in Chile in this dispatch for Lazo Magazine.

https://lazomagazine.com/in-chile-k-pop-dance-groups-are-wildly-popular/

On the weekends, the streets of the financial district in Santiago de Chile typically lie deserted, and the towering office skyscrapers adorned with tall glass windows dim their lights until the humdrum of Monday morning resumes. But since the COVID-19 lockdowns ended, the area has unexpectedly

26/05/2024

Lazo Magazine's founder, Cristina Maza, has a weekly newsletter that will keep you informed about international affairs if you're too busy to read the news every day. Subscribe here:

a newsletter about international affairs. Click to read Lazo Letters, by Cristina Maza, a Substack publication.

25/05/2024

Colombia's Subundoy Valley has a particularly unique history.

https://lazomagazine.com/cultural-pluralism-and-the-indigenous-people-of-the-sibundoy-valley/

I spent three months conducting anthropological research in the Sibundoy Valley, a verdant basin nestled between the Andes and the Amazon in southwest Colombia. There, the Indigenous cultures of the Kamëntšá and Inga peoples coexist alongside the majority mestizo population and an influx of forei...