The Art of Leaving China
Will Moss at Imagethief has a funny, poignant post announcing his departure from China after eight years. I particularly liked this part: For an increasingly cosmopolitan and globally interconnected...
View ArticleThe Chinese Tax Payer
Eli Binder of Tea Leaf Nation has noticed an interesting rhetorical shift in Chinese discourse: people have begun referring to themselves as “taxpayers”: Over the past year, the word “taxpayer”...
View ArticleNew Year, New City, New Job
Happy New Year! It’s hard to believe that it’s already 2013. (Where did the time go? I have so many appointments!) Once again, as always, I want to thank all of you for reading and for your e-mails and...
View ArticleThoughts on Richard Sherman
I know sideline interviews after football games are stupid. I know players rarely speak with candor, so Richard Sherman’s remarks were refreshing. I know racist bigots said terrible things about him on...
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The Perils of Chinese Bootleg DVDs
Matthew Yglesias has an amusing post about the Chinese pirated version of Old Boy, a Korean film recently remade in the U.S. Alas, the DVD cover included a negative blurb of the film: Oops. Yglesias...
View ArticleOn Kunming
I have a piece up this morning at the Daily Beast on Saturday’s horrific terrorist attack in Kunming, arguing that China still hasn’t figured out a way to deal with its Uighur minority. We still have a...
View ArticleWhy Suicide Is Just Suicide
Just over a year ago, early one Thursday morning, I sent an email to my college friend in Oakland with a link to a story about Jason Giambi, a baseball player he had admired when we first met, 13 years...
View ArticleLanguages Change. Deal With It
As a person who makes a living as a writer, I take the English language quite seriously. So I was of course delighted that The New York Times Sunday Review published an op-ed addressing one of my pet...
View ArticleA Modest Proposal: Ban Oscar Hosts
Yesterday I wrote a piece for the Atlantic revisiting David Letterman’s infamous 1995 stint as the host of the Oscars. This gave me an opportunity to discuss other notable failures, such as Seth...
View ArticleIf Seinfeld Episodes Featured Cell Phones
Hulu recently acquired the rights to Seinfeld and has put all nine seasons online, so over the last few days I’ve been going through and re-watching a few of my favorite episodes. The show’s brilliance...
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