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China Soft-Power Watch: the Yang Rui 'Foreign Bitch' Factor
This story is all over the China-hand blogosphere, and is so strange that at first I was sure it was a joke. But apparently it isn't. It involves the man below, shown in a WSJ screen shot, and here is...
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China Update: Chen, Yang
1) As everyone on the China beat has been discussing, the civil-rights activist Chen Guangcheng and his immediate family received permission to leave China and at this moment are en route to Newark....
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The Mystery of the 'Free Puppies!' Scam
Thanks to the 100+ people who have written in to speculate on the economic rationale behind the oddball "Free Bulldog Puppies" scam email I mentioned a few days ago. I'm sure I know what the answer is...
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Today's Filibuster Reading List, with Practical Suggestions!
The Atlantic still laments the departure /graduation /loss of our friend and colleague Joshua Green (at right), who did great work here for many years and is now at Bloomberg Business Week. But he...
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My Last 'Book News' Post in This Space
My tech colleagues at the Atlantic have graciously set up a special standalone page for book-related info. (Thank you: Betsy, Clarissa, Sarah, Jennie.) As of tomorrow, I will have wrangled it...
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Knowing What We Don't Know, China Dept.
Late in 2009, when President Obama was making his first trip to China, I did a running set of (increasingly amazed and and occasionally peeved) notes on how the traveling U.S. press corps was covering...
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Debut of a New 'China Airborne' Page
Thanks to the efforts of our tech staff, a standalone page about my new book should now exist. It's here. I've just done a light initial populating of it with info and will try to keep it up to date...
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Ask Dr. Popkin: Gay Marriage and the Biden Factor
Let's take a trip back in time -- back a whole two weeks ago, when the Cranbrook Haircut was the dominant making-of-the-president issue, emerging as it did immediately after Barack Obama's comments...
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In Praise of the WSJ Ed PageāNo, Seriously!
You know that an analysis of modern politics is careening toward "false equivalence" territory when it says that "extremists of the right and left" are, in their symmetrical and indistinguishable way,...
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Media Update: Morning Joe, Yahoo Finance, 'Happy With Crappy'
I will graft these onto my Official 'China Airborne' Info Page shortly, but at the moment and for the record:1) A discussion on Morning Joe this morning, in which I was talking about what there is to...
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My New Favorite City
It's Tavares, Florida, which has declared itself "America's Seaplane City." No, wait, maybe it's Bend, Oregon -- which in more innocent days I had associated with interesting, innovative aircraft (plus...
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This Is So Interesting (With False-Equivalence Implications)
I am simply piggy-backing here on a very popular item by Alexander Abad-Santos on The Atlantic Wire. But on the off chance that you have not seen it, this really is worth a look.It's a comparison of...
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Cognitive Dissonance Dept: Conservatives vs. US Military
Some time today, please read this item by Heather Hurlburt, at Democracy Arsenal. It's about the way the professional U.S. military is increasingly at odds with (wait for it) modern GOP right-wingers,...
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Pushback on NPR vs. Fox
I get off a connecting flight in Newark, en route to Shanghai, to see a mailbox full of notes questioning an item from last night. That item was based on a chart appearing to show that Fox News viewers...
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The Yang Rui Saga Morphs Into the Surreal
Yang Rui is the internationally minded anchor of CCTV's English-language "Dialogue" talk show, whose travails following an anti-foreigner screed I mentioned last week.Since then the complications have...
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Obama and Roberts: the View From 2005
Here are two quotes from two 40-ish Harvard Law School graduates back in 2005. They make for a very interesting comparison now. First, a few words of set-up:I mentioned recently, in an item about the...
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Your China-Economy Reading List for the Evening
In my first few hours back in Shanghai, I am newly amazed by the scale and pace of the building, of the ambitions, of the problems, and of the range of Chinese dreams realistic and fanciful. More on...
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Krugman, Fingleton, and Japan
When I was holed up in Beijing for several months last year finishing my China book, Eamonn Fingleton was part of a virtuoso team of guest bloggers who filled in for me in this space. One of his items...
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Pushback on Fox-NPR Pushback
I don't mean to make this an endlessly recursive loop, Escher-style, but some readers object to previous readers' objections to an earlier item about Fox News. The first item described a survey...
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Today's China News, in Words and Pictures
1) I have a piece in the NYT Sunday Review section today, on the question many Chinese economists and industrialists are asking themselves but that relatively few outsiders recognize. Essentially it is...
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