this is the kind of story that you write when you've received a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis reporting to go to Ethiopia; you go to Ethiopia but are basically clueless about the place; so you fumble around for a while and then come back.

And then you write a non-story to justify the grant.

this is the kind of thing that happens all the time in Africa. I guess it's kind of interesting in a diary kind of way, but surely the thing to do is to get beyond this and work out what's actually going on. Never easy in Africa, but there is a real story here and the job of a journalist ought to be to work hard, hang in and do research, see through the smoke and tell a bigger story than the one you told here.

Even more pointedly, (and though I never do this, I feel compelled to post), this is really an irresponsible, lazy, unethical piece of journalism, lacking any empathy toward its subject and a part of the world described as a "barren waste of scrub." It might as well be called "my email journey into the heart of darkness" for all the illumination the journalist provides. He seems to view all he encounters with suspicion, even the receptionst who asks for a $50.00 Sim card which will soon be of no use to him and which is certainly out of the financial reach of most of the local population - but he, a comparatively well-off American journalist, cannot possibly afford to part it without some form of remuneration.

Surely, the reason that his "hapless African rebel" is after the American and his money is because he is desperately impoverished. The reason why his "hapless African rebel" has amusingly bad grammar is because he did not have access to a first-world education. The motives of this man and why he is even involved in this by-the-journalist sloppily-defined, exoticized rebellion goes unexplored.

Above all, the author seems to be sneering at and taking "cruel delight" in a man who is seemingly able to seek refugee status because of his plight, who is visibly suffering and malnourished, who has lost his baby to no-doubt easily-preventable disease. And hilarious - Reagan, according to the journalist - actually believes that he will receive millions of dollars if he emails his credit card number. It's a good thing the author received a grant to go to Africa in order to write this satirical picaresque about an Ethiopian man who is so "dumb" that he actually falls for a scam that is sucessfully perpetrated on at least thousands of Americans by Africans whose poverty is directly attributable to the unfair economic world order. Let's not "other" a whole continent in our journalism please.

Give a fool a hammer... Denver, and United Nations, huh. Nicky, a little out of your league are you? Maybe you should have trekked to Aspen, picked up a National Geographic, plagarized a bit here and there and wrote about a fantastic East African safari hunt. Leave the good picking to the pros

This is one of the oddest and meanest articles I've seen on Salon. What exactly is the point here? Some guy flew to Africa, couldn't find a story, and so instead he decided to write about the detached bemusement he felt while playing email tag with some starving native? And the last part of the article is just disturbing. Is Reagan's emaciated desperation supposed to be funny? I'm sure he'd love to know that ol' Nick is getting paid to shred what dignity he might have left in some web magazine for rich white folks behind his back, after pretending to be his friend (and since Nick couldn't actually accomplish the feat that so many other real journalists have actually managed to do under similar circumstances, i.e. find a real story). The more I think about it, the more outrageous it is.

I'm sure other reporters hold a similarly condescending and de-humanized view of the foreign people they report on, but at least they presumably try to keep it out of their stories. Such hypocrisy doesn't seem quite so bad to me anymore. This is a peek into the journalistic sausage factory I'd rather not have had.

This is my second letter about this "article". I just looked a little closer at the illustration for this story, and it is indeed outrageous, if not outright hateful and disgusting. Some bug-eyed cartoon caricature of an Ethiopian with quotes from "Reagan" posted around his head?

This is bullshit. Why didn't you just post a "Li'l Black Sambo" cartoon (and maybe you could add a malnourished Ethiopian potbelly for extra hilarity) for all the privileged liberal readers of Salon to laugh at?

Would you post a mocking caricature of a starving Palestinian "wannabe guerrilla" in such a way? Why not? Does Reagan know that him and his cause--however "loony" they might be to the cappuccino-sipping jackasses at Salon--are being used as a laughingstock for Salon's readership?

Total bullshit. This is one of the worst editorial decisions I've ever seen in Salon, and that's saying a lot. This idiocy belongs on a Ku Klux Klan website.

a) Journalist goes to Ethiopia to uncover human rights abuses.

b) Journalist can't actually do his job and instead meets with someone who seems vaguely suspicious (which scares the Journalist Trying to Write About Separatist Rebels), who later turns out to actually be somehow involved with a group that is apparently trying to struggle for independence from Ethiopia's authoritarian regime, and perhaps get control of the massive oil wealth that will no doubt instead eventually be stolen from right under their noses.

c) Above-named "wannabe rebel" later gets arrested, calls the "journalist" for help, winds up starved and begging, and somehow can't write journalist's story for him.

d) Journalist instead retires to his nice hotel and writes a story about "his" Hapless African Rebel and his zany struggle for independence (too bad for Reagan that he's not killing Jews in Gaza), accompanied with an astoundingly offensive cartoon depicting some impoverished Somalian as a bug-eyed, fire-breathing loon.

Classy stuff, Salon.