Yunnan Magazine, a beautiful little magazine I have written for, is now online- check out an abstract of my article! /shameless self-promotion
One of Andrew Sullivan’s correspondents today, an English teacher in Shenzhen, wrote the following about how the recession is playing out in China: …it’s surprising how well China’s Maoist legacy acts as a safety net inside a capitalist economy. Shenzhen and cities like it, effectively, have half of their population living not as citizens, but [...]
On Monday, my friend and I (who share a birthday) invited about 20 people to a Tibetan restaurant in Kunming for our birthday dinner. Neither of us had been before, but the place had been recommended by a couple of good friends and we thought we’d try something different. The deal at the restaurant included [...]
As if you didn’t have enough of me already (did I remind you it’s my birthday?), I’ve set up a Twitter account now, under the creative name of “MattSchiavenza”. If you’re a reader and have a twitter account, add me and I promise to “follow” you too. If you don’t have an account, go and [...]
A few days ago, Seth Gimlan, a high school classmate of mine, passed away. I never knew Seth well, but being classmates in a class of 140 or so tends to bond people together. After graduation, I lost touch with all but a dozen or so people I knew from those days. Facebook, for all [...]
Well, in celebration of his 28th birthday, your humble blogger shall delve in a moment of self-indulgence. Because I can. 1. All the little things people nag you about; flossing, doing the dishes, putting the cheese back in a plastic bag; are actually good advice. 2. Travel is good for the soul. 3. I don’t [...]
Salon publishes an interesting interview with Rick Steves, an American travel writer who recently returned from a trip to Iran. I’ve never been a huge fan of Steves and typically regarded his followers as sheep, but in this interview he comes across as thoughtful and interesting. A lot of his observations seem naive on the [...]
The controversy over Chas Freeman, who recently withdrew after being appointed by President Obama as the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, has elicited a number of strong opinions in the blogosphere since his appointment was first announced in mid-February. For those unaware of Freeman and this particular kerfuffle, a useful time line can be [...]
Allow me to direct your attention to an excellent Danwei post (via an equally interesting post by James Fallows) detailing a new proposal for China to revert to traditional characters, the writing system abandoned on the mainland in the 1950s. To summarize: a representative named Pan Qinglin proposed junking simplified characters due to three reasons, [...]
Did anyone else find this film spectacularly bad? Because I did. It seems to me that Oliver Stone lazily compiled a list of every soundbite from the Bush administration, cobbled them together in a simplistic narrative, and hoped for the best. The part of the film documenting Bush’s young adulthood worked a little better, but [...]