So I crammed all those books into my head, and as I suspected, I can’t stop. I’m still cramming, still trying to slip just a few more books under my brain. It’s not that I need to. I want to. That’s what too much reading will do to you: it’ll make you want to read more. (Well, at least that’s how it goes with me.)

But because I’m getting close to exam time, I’m trying to concentrate more on the reading, with less time for writing about the books as I go. So, these will be brief: Full story »

#15: Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation by L. Maarten Troost (2008)

The first time I landed in Shanghai, I couldn’t believe how big everything was. The terminal stretched off to some Whovian vanishing point. It was like that driving through the city, too—mile after mile of skyscraper, each as interesting to look at as the last. This was a city that wanted to be Manhattan but bigger, richer, busier.

But the bus windows showed me something distressing, too, as we rumbled across the coastal plain from the airport to the city: muddy canals choked with floating garbage, heaps of garbage and rubble scattered in back lots and side yards, an armada of small blue flatbed trucks jockeying for first place in a race that wasn’t even happening.

China turned my brain into an Escher landscape, constantly challenging me at every turn. I found new things to be amazed about, new things to wonder about, and new things to worry about. Full story »

This author is of the opinion that Iran isn’t developing nuclear weapons. But those who believe otherwise might find themselves distracted by what students at Georgetown University are learning. At the Washington Post, William Wan reports:

Led by their hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data.

The result of their effort? The largest body of public knowledge about thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps. … designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal [which, they're learning] could be many times larger than the well-established estimates of arms-control experts. … China’s nuclear warheads could number as many as 3,000. Full story »

by Matthew Record

For America, especially American companies, The People’s Republic of China is like a wild west for the modern day: a vast, untamed opportunity for companies and all Americans with an ideological missionary impulse or anyone who salivates at the largest single-state market in the world. That’s why Google represents such an interesting fulcrum in the battle of the hearts and minds of the People’s Republic: Google is both an economic success story and an ideological entity with its motto: “Don’t be evil.” Indeed, “that’s why China hits the American mind so hard. It is a country whose scale dwarfs the United States. With 1.3 billion people, it has four times America’s population. For more than a hundred years, American missionaries and businessmen dreamed of the possibilities—one billion souls to save, two billion armpits to deodorize” (Zakaria 87). Full story »

NASA and its spooky Sith-lord counterpart, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, are teaming up to achieve the impossible: interplanetary colonialism. DARPA, known for its role in developing such technologies as the internet and GPS, has also funded cyborg beetles implanted with electrodes that control their flight by radio, battery powered human exoskeletons, and ravenous robots called EATRs which find and consume biomass (read humans) for fuel.

The stated purpose of DARPA is to maintain military supremacy through technological superiority. During the dark nights after Sputnik first blinked overhead, Americans gathered in their bomb shelters and grumbled that we should do something before the other guys do it to us. In our innocence, we had no idea what that something might be, so we put together a crack team of scientific geniuses to discover it. Full story »

The Bankside Power Station was closed in 1981 leaving a handsome, and increasingly derelict, face-brick building in a prestigious spot by the side of the river Thames in the heart of the city of London.

After an expensive conversion the building reopened as the Tate Modern. “Modern” in that it features art produced since 1900. Here you will find works by Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. However, the Tate also commissions new work.

On 12 October they opened a major new installation in the vast – completely insanely gargantuan – Turbine Hall. Ai Weiwei is a 53-year-old Chinese ceramicist and his Sunflower Seeds is nothing less than 100 million individually crafted and painted porcelain sunflower seeds poured onto the floor. These were produced by 1,900 skilled artisans from the city of Jingdezhen, famed for its production of Imperial porcelain, over a two-year period.

Until Thursday you could happily walk and play in the seeds. Kids lay on their backs to make sunflower seed angels, businessmen shrugged off their patent-leather shoes and strolled back and forth in their suits, young couples picnicked. It was delightful.

Since Thursday it is a health hazard. Full story »

“Hollywood is so crooked that Mafia gangsters are entirely outclassed and don’t stand a chance. People in Hollywood are smarter. They have more sophisticated knowledge of money and deals and how to steal legally rather than illegally.” Who said it? Full story »

“I think women rule the world and that no man has ever done anything that a woman either hasn’t allowed him to do or encouraged him to do.” Who said it? Full story »

“If you’re really pro-life, do me a favor—don’t lock arms and block medical clinics. If you’re so pro-life, lock arms and block cemeteries.” Who said it? Full story »

“Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity.” Who said it? Full story »

I’m in Nanjing because of Iris Chang.

In fact, like many Americans, the only reason I’ve ever even heard of Nanjing is because of Iris Chang.

Chang’s book The Rape of Nanking had a profound effect on me when I read it a couple years ago. Ever since, I’ve wanted to visit the city, to walk the ground, to hear the whispered cries of the war-dead who’d been so long forgotten until Chang finally wrote their story. She wanted to make sure no one ever forgot that story—ever.

It was December, 1937. Full story »

Part eight in a series

Folks who know me well know I love a good adventure.

On my ninth day in China, I embark on what might be my boldest adventure ever.

At 6:00 a.m., my daughter and I get into a cab, ride to the airport, and fly to the city of Nanjing for the day—just the two of us, flying into the interior of a country where we don’t know the language, we don’t know any people, and we don’t even know specifically where we’re going. Full story »

Part seven in a series

When his majesty Yongle, third emperor of the Ming Dynasty, decided he wanted a new house, he wanted to do it up big. Really big. From his palace in the southern capital of Nanjing, he set one million peasants and 100,000 artisans to work hundreds of miles to the north, in Beijing, where he intended to move the capital. The year was 1406.

Fourteen years later, in 1420, Yongle finally moved north and took the seat of power with him. Some 120 million people—more than the entire population of Europe—were ruled from the new palace, which was so huge and so off-limits, that it was called the Forbidden City.

So huge in scope and scale was it that Emperor Yongle might have well called it the Imposing City. Or the Overwhelming City. Or the “Big, Just Like Everything Else In China” City.

But it’s not so forbidden any more. Full story »

Retired people in China do many things during the course of the day to keep themselves occupied and physically fit. One especially interesting form of exercise is sidewalk poetry. A writer will use a special self-wetting brush to draw poems on the sidewalk. It is a deliberate, artful process.

“Doing good makes people happy. Reading is even better.”

(My thanks to my friend Sabrina Sun for the translation help.)

Part six in a series

As I make the ride from the Beijing airport to our hotel, I have a line from Patrick Watson’s clack-clickity song “Beijing” running as a soundtrack in my head.

“It was the sound of a city. Speaks to me,” he sings. “It was the sound of a city. Sang me a song.”

Wastson’s song is full of cymbals and drums and all sorts of frenetic tick-tack percussion that clinks and clucks and clanks and clangs. It buzzes, bumps, and bounces. The back and forth piano reminds me of the tempo of morning rush hour, and the violin crescendos from just-woke-up speed to that of frenetic commuter. It is, indeed, the hustle-bustle sound of a city.

And Beijing is, if nothing else, all hustle and bustle. Full story »

Part five in a series from China

It may be the cleanest alley in the world. Walls of ash-gray brick rise three stories on either side, running straight and tight and true.

The alley is otherwise nondescript except for the gold-colored manhole covers, ornamented with intricate patterns. No papers litter the ground, no gum wrappers, no cans. Not even any dirt, really. The alley is crisp, clean, almost antiseptic.

Behind us, across the bus-filled parking lot, the Tianjin Eye, a Ferris wheel 35-stories tall, stands over the Haihe River. Seven meters taller than the Eye that stands over the Thames in London, the Tianjin Eye rises from between the lanes of traffic in the middle of bridge that crosses the Haihe. It is a symbol for all that is new and modern here in Tianjin, the fifth-largest city in China and one of the country’s most important seaports.

Much of Tianjin—at least what we see on the city’s north side—is dirty and dilapidated. It’s a city of peeled paint and rust and crumbling concrete, with grass growing up through the cracks. There are piles of rubble everywhere. Tianjin is in dire need of a makeover. Full story »

Part four in a series from China

“Smooth as silk,” it seems, isn’t as smooth as I’ve always been lead to believe.

“Is little rougher than polyester,” our guide tells us. “Has texture.”

She’s standing in front of us in a small, neat seminar room at the No. 1 Silk Factory. She has passed around two cloth samples: one made of silk and one made of polyester, and she’s challenged us to tell the difference.

Sure enough, one of them is smooth as silk and the other is slightly less so.

“Polyester also shinier,” she says. “Also, it flammable. Anyone have lighter?” she asks. Remarkably, in a room full of graduate students, no one does. Our guide pats the pockets of her brown business suit, but she comes up empty, too. “Silk not burn. Fireproof,” she says.

Her demonstration has worked in the past, though. One of the samples, the smoother, shinier one, has several holes burned into it. When she asks again if we can tell which sample is the polyester, one of the students, Jerry, holds it up. “The one with the burn holes in it,” he says. His classmates laugh.

With Jerry’s guess, the silkworm’s now out of the bag, so it’s time to start our tour of the factory floor to learn how silk is made. Full story »

Part three in a series from China

China is larger than life.

It boasts the world’s largest population. It has the world’s fastest growing economy. It embodies the most dramatic social contrasts.

But on the day we visit the Chinese pavilion at the World Expo, China becomes larger than larger-than-life.

The pavilion itself is China writ large. It represents everything China wishes to be—and, in most cases, is: big, powerful, commanding, visionary. Full story »

Part two in a series from China

“Welcome to Shanghai,” the banners along the highway say. “Better city, better life.”

At first I mistake it for propaganda promoting some kind of urban improvement program. After all, when I visited Shanghai last year, the city was one huge construction zone in preparation for this year’s World Expo. But the highways have been built, the downtown buildings have been facelifted, the greenspaces trimmed and tidied. Shanghai has its best face forward.

“Better City, Better Life,” it turns out, is the theme for the Expo. Full story »

Sorry for the long absence. Let’s carry on, shall we? “If you listen to the guys up in the stands, pretty soon you’ll be up there sitting with them.” Who said it? Full story »