Contributor to PRI's The World
Alina Simone is a writer based in New York. She tends to favor marginalia over plot.
I actually started my career as an indie-rock singer and spent most of my time in far-flung bars and basements from Olympia, Washington to Arkhangelsk, Russia, where I was psyched to learn there are rock clubs even in the Arctic Circle. Perhaps it was these years spent in distant hidey-holes singing to four forlorn Swedes that keeps me inspired, as a writer, to seek out stories that are unusual, arcane and perhaps interesting only to me.
In addition to reporting for PRI's The World, I am the author of the essay collection, You Must Go and Win, and the novel, Note to Self (both published by Faber). My writing has also appeared in The New York Times, New York Times Magazine and The Wall Street Journal, among other places.
Immigrant researchers and professors must often take low-paid "survival jobs" in the US. At Brooklyn's summer Open Air University, they're sharing their niche expertise.
Many Russians perceive Donald Trump as an American version of Vladimir Putin. It's partly based on Trump's bombastic rhetoric, but also on how his speeches and tweets are translated into Russian.
Linguist Edward Vajda went to Siberia with a hunch. He returned with evidence linking a remote Siberian language with Navajo and other Athabaskan languages.
The first ransomware virus was unleashed in 1989 — so WannaCry is hardly a new idea. But it has some novel techniques.
NASA and high-tech billionaires aren't the only ones who want to get to the red planet.
In Japan, it's thought that thousands of people disappear themselves, driven underground by the stigma of debt, job loss, even failing an exam.
What’s the word most people associate with the country of South Korea? K-pop. At least according to one survey conducted in Korea last year.
Back in the 1960s, there were fewer than 10 lion dancer troupes participating in the Lunar New Year parade in New York's China. Today it’s more like 40 or 50.
Victims of online romance scams suffer some of the highest financial losses of any internet-based crimes, the FBI says.
Around the US, Jewish delis have fallen on hard times. But the one of the oldest delis in Canada — Schwartz’s of Montreal — has an unlikely savior.
For more than 100 years, the governments of both the United States and Canada forcibly assimilated generations of Native people by taking their children and sending them off to English-only boarding schools — a process the pushed the majority of indigenous languages to the brink of extinction. More than 35 years ago, a small Mohawk tribe in New York decided to fight back — by creating a school of its own.