Didem Tali

The Battambang Roses qualified to be a part of Cambodia’s women’s wheelchair basketball team for the 2018 Asia Para Games. I followed them for months to produce this documentary about their struggles and triumphs.

When the Cambodian women’s wheelchair basketball team headed to their first major international competition, they found wins off the court.

Didem Tali for The New York Times
ISTANBUL — Pinar Satioglu, 48, a dentist from the Anatolian part of Istanbul, leaves her clinic duties behind every Friday, as she has done for the past 20 years. Instead of treating dental patients, she spends her day at the Kadikoy Municipality’s Center for Street Dog Rehabilitation, feeding, walking and giving care to about 400 rescued dogs.
In Istanbul alone, a megacity of 15 million people, there are thought to be 130,000 dogs and 125,000 cats roaming fr...

Society
It was the early 19th century when the global human population reached a billion for the first time. Then, in just a couple of centuries, this figure grew more than sevenfold. The world population currently stands at around 7.6 billion. As the globe prepares to be the home of almost 10 billion inhabitants by 2050, members of each generation leave a unique mark in history.
Even though the global societies are aging, the rapid population growth means that the majority of the people in t...

Architecture
Since humans constructed the first examples of architecture 12,000 years ago in Southeast Turkey, this art of design and plan always had the unique ability to capture the zeitgeist. Even though architecture’s development depends on the turns of the global economy, the way people build houses never fails to reflect the demographic shifts, top concerns, and aspirations. Following rapid urbanization, peaking environmental concerns, and the cultural shift brought by the generational ...

“Where are all the female architects?” Allison Arieff, a design and architecture writer, questioned in a 2018 opinion piece for the New York Times. “Nearly half of architecture students are women. Why are so few sticking with the industry after graduation?”
Since human settlements stopped living in caves around 10,000 BC, women have always built houses, cities, and contributed to their civilizations in immeasurable ways. However, they didn’t always get the credit for it.
Despite some of the r...

Building Information Modelling (BIM) had its beginnings in the 1970s, as the design innovators from the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Block competed to create a software solution to disrupt the architecture. Thanks to this technology, which keeps growing and optimizing itself, in the late 20th century, modern architecture went through a mini-renaissance.

BIM’s collaborative nature allows multiple stakeholders like architects, engineers, and other construction professionals, to...

My boyfriend recently took a week-long trip to Berlin, all alone. When he returned, he regaled me with tales of how he’d wandered late at night, into the cobalt-blue early morning; of how he’d made fast friends at his crowded hostel; of how he’d spent long, directionless afternoons getting lost among the concrete anomalies of the city.
I was jealous; I’d been stuck in an office while he was exploring. But a larger part of me was jealous of something vaguer, and more significant:
I wish my acu...

Technology
Technology is oozing into a large number of industries. As the “Tech” family is expanding its family tree by marrying other sectors, new terms to refer to sub-sectors keep emerging. Names like FinTech (financial technology), InsurTech (insurance technology), RegTech (regulatory technology), and PropTech (property technology) are widely in use. However, as these multi-billion-dollar industries keep raising their influence on global markets, there’s still much mystery surrounding a n...

Countless children around the world dream of being an astronaut. Chelsea Cook, a physicist from Virginia, admits she was one of them. However, unlike many children who become interested in space after watching a cartoon, the young scientist credits her fascination with space to a braille book.

“Touch the stars,” Cook mused, “How can you touch the stars when they are so far away, so hot, so untouchable?”
“Touch the Stars” was the name of a braille astronomy book that Cook received at the age o...

Ramadan, or Ramzan, is annually observed by Muslims around the world as a holy month of fasting, prayer and community. During this time, those observing will fast from dawn to sunset, refraining from eating or drinking as a means of purifying the body, mind and heart.

After sunset, many will gather to break their fast with family and friends, sharing a meal known as an iftar. Around the world, the languages and the foods might change, but the spirit of love and togetherness is all the same.

In the last months of 2016, teenage sisters Aung Zin (14) and Win Kyaw (16) noticed that their mother was getting closer to a neighbour woman, who worked as a food hawker selling pork stews.

Word spread that the neighbour was moving to Yangon—Myanmar’s former capital and most populous city with over five million residents—a place with significantly more economic and educational opportunities than Aung Zin and Win Kyaw’s hometown in Mandalay province.
“My mother told me and my sister that this...

Most visitors to Cambodia are eager to see the ancient temple complex of Angkor or the beaches of Sihanoukville, but there is one sight they may want to shield their eyes from: mountains of plastic bags, bottles and styrofoam boxes.

Despite remaining on the World Bank’s list of “least developed countries”, Cambodia has enjoyed solid economic growth in recent decades. The Southeast Asian nation has sustained an average GDP growth rate of 7.6 per cent over the last 20 years, the sixth highest i...

A former migrant worker singlehandedly built a children’s park out of a landfill in Ulaanbaatar.
ULAANBAATAR — When Sodnomsengee Ulziitogtork, 42, returned home to Mongolia after spending several years working as a construction laborer in South Korea, the first thing that caught his attention was the lack of parks and public spaces in his home country.
“In Korea, there are many parks and children play in safe, clean, beautiful areas,” Ulziitogtork, who is locally known by the nickname “Ulzii,...

A dark-dining restaurant in Phnom Penh offers a unique sensory experience while providing employment for visually impaired people.
In the entrance of a tall, traditional Khmer building in Cambodia, a dim purple light illuminates Honey, a 29-year-old server who greets her guests.
“I will be your guide today during this dining experience,” Honey, who prefers to use this nickname, says in English as she opens a safe box. “But before we can proceed upstairs to the dining area, you’ll need to leav...