Month: February 2011

  • Police-led protests? Satire and the 'Jasmine Revolution' [translation]

    Twitter and several online communities lit up last night with talk of gatherings in several cities in China that had apparently been organized online and were given the moniker “Jasmine Revolution.” The people who gathered, according to the reports I’ve seen, were quickly dispersed or arrested by police. My first note is to caution that…

  • The fate of the UCCA art space in 798

    Early today I put a new header image at the top of this site. It’s cropped from a picture of an artist working on a grand installation in the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, a gallery/museum in Beijing’s 798 art district. A few hours later, I heard the ambitious project was coming to a sort…

  • The internet entrepôts of China: back to the 19th century?

    For centuries, and especially since the mid-19th century, entrepôts have been important sites of communication—both information and goods—between China and the outside world. Now, many of the same cities are sites of the grand digital switches that connect China to the global internet. I’ve noted before the interesting work of TeleGeography, a firm that produces…

  • A Literary Note: Benjamin Hale, Alexandra Kleeman, and LEAP

    It’s been a good few months for my more literary friends. Most recently, an old friend Ben Hale (website, blog) has published his first novel and received very good reviews, including in the New York Times Book Review. I was lucky enough to read The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore in proofs, and that copy is still…