- Recent
- Popular
- Tags (0)
- Subscribers (1)
- The Greatest Firewall of AllDecember 8 2008
-
There are times when the chinese words come to you as friends. “Neng gan! Yes, you can!”, they whisper in your ear. On every taxi ride, on shop fronts, banners and building names, they flatter you, show you how much you already know: “Way to go, wo de pengyou!” Old vocabulary learned many years ago enters your mind with ease. Just another month and you’ll be able to fluently converse with everybody.
Ha! Don’t you ever trust them, they are just mocking you and will come back at you with a vengeance! “Hey, stupid laowai! What do you make of us today…?”, they greet you one morning. You stare at them in utter disbelief. You don’t even understand how they are written. Their shape and sound leave your memory as soon as your heart starts its next beat. “Oh,” they sigh in triumphant disappointment, “but you have to try harder. Na jiu duo nuli ba!”
- Laws of AttractionDecember 7 2008
-
Sometimes it’s like the lifting of something. A burden, or a veil. You see clearer then, things suddenly begin to talk, or even swing. It happens, not of your doing, like a dance. Sometimes it’s the opposite, you are drawn into something, but feel paralyzed, unable to make the right move. You get bigger, clumsier, struggling hard to keep out, take a breath, keep your balance. Sometimes it’s none of these, more like a careful response to something, you are clear-minded and rational. You weigh your risks, place your bets, try to stay true. You fend off the temptations and open your heart.
- In Praise of another VirtueDecember 6 2008
-
After talking about courage as the worthiest of virtues it is time to praise another one of highest, probably equal rank: the ability to enter other peoples minds and hearts, to see the world with their eyes, to suffer their pains, to cherish their joys. This is a capacity essential to what people these days call “emotional intelligence”, and such to all social behaviour and nearly everything that is good and fun.
This time I am going to let somebody else do the argument, someone far more eloquent, far more knowledgeable. Read the revered novelist, comedian, actor, director, blogger, geek Stephen Fry on the topic of Imagination.
- Chilling at BookwormDecember 4 2008
-
People are wearing their coats and scarfs today in the big glass house that is the main room of Beijing’s legendary Bookworm café. Outside, the afternoon sky is brilliant, but temperatures have suddenly dropped well below zero. A strong and biting wind penetrates the glass walls and lets them groan. No way the heating can make it against this assault of northern asian frost. It’s a weather outside that could kill an ill-protected person within few hours.
- On Loving McDonald’s (Aren’t We All?)November 30 2008
-
In times of crisis it’s ideas that count. That much has just been forcefully argued by Paul Krugman in the New York Review of Books. You might think, well, that’s kind of trivial, isn’t it? Indeed, but there are still human resources in the upper echelons of management especially in the media industry that haven’t understood the message. They respond to the obvious misconception of the current pipe systems by applying even more hydraulics.