Pete O’Neal, former Black Panther, is running an orphanage in rural Tanzania and confronting his mortality.

Author and Professor Dr Jamillah Karim spent a year living in Kuala Lumpur. Read this great interview by Sister Brooke, and then visit Dr Jamillah’s blog for a series of thoughtful reflections on what living in Malaysia was like for her as an African American Muslim, what insights she gained about the immigrant Muslim experience in America and more.

Granfalloon (n) : “A proud and meaningless association of human beings.” A word coined by Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) in his book Cat’s Cradle. I was recalling the concept recently for some reason but couldn’t bring the term to mind. There it is: A granfalloon. The idea is illustrated in the book by a woman from Indiana who is just thrilled to meet Hoosiers everywhere she goes, a Hoosier being a name for people from the state of Indiana, but the shared qualities she recognizes in …

The Brass Crescent Awards for 2011 are open for voting. There are just a huge number of quality blogs up for consideration. Polls close on November 7.

Muslims in the West: A Photo Journal. Another great minimalist concept along the lines of Muslims Wearing Things. They accept submissions.

American prisoner weds Singaporean in a touching story of international romance from 30Mosques.

Check out Mloggers, a muslim blog aggregator/ranker project by Omar Tufail of Deenport.com. If you run a muslim blog, you can sign up here.

Synopsis of the upcoming sequel to James Cameron’s Avatar:
Sulley continues to grow and mature as a Na’vi. We explore the wondrous beauty of the planet with him and the nuances of Na’vi society. But he begins to see aspects of the Na’vi he never noticed before that trouble him. He notices conflicts within the tribe that he tries to solve. But his solutions are not apt and they are not welcomed. He finds he still cannot communicate in Na’vi the way born Na’vi can, and at night, he dreams in …

The 2010 Brass Crescent Awards have been announced. Al-Miskeenah finally won!

Voting is open for the Brass Crescent Awards. It’s a great time to check out all the interesting new sites that have popped up over the last year. All the contestants in the media category are all very cool, particularly 30 Mosques in 30 Days, Muslims Wearing Things, and Muslim365, the recent resurrection of the old Muslim-a-Day.com. See also PhiloSufi, Al-Miskeenah, Shafii Fiqh, LoonWatch and Abu Pokemon. There are a number of old sites that are still hanging on to life too, particularly the perpetual …

The Brass Crescent Awards 2010 are now open for nominations.

An article about Three Roods Farm by Garrison Benson.

When Dr. Greg uses the verb “observe” (which is often), he means a willful action, not a passively received effect. Once, for instance, we delivered a cartload of dead leaves to the adolescent chickens, to “stimulate their instincts,” and Dr. Greg suggested that we observe them. We sat in silence for ten minutes (that’s a third of a TV show, for most of us) watching the chickens stand still and nervously eye the leaves. “Well,” he said eventually, “We can come back …