Archive for the ‘Asia’ Category

China’s Eco-City Plans: too good to be true?

I find cities and their role in modern global life entirely fascinating and extremely important, as I’ve written about many times. This is a really exciting story, reported in Business Insider: China is beginning a project, a giant eco-city that 80,000 people can live in, with greatly reduced water and electricity usage, less waste produced, [...]

A tragedy in South Asia, 1947: Part 1 of reflections on Indian Summer

I am endlessly fascinated by India. I fueled the flames in college while earning my minor in Asian studies, and my last semester in school, having finished already with my senior thesis, I relaxed by taking a double dose of India: South Asian politics and Modern India history classes, right alongside each other. It was [...]

A new Chernobyl

Photographer David Guttenfelder recently won a World Press Photo Award for his work, for National Geographic, on the deserted town of Namie, Japan–which lies within a 12-mile radius of the site of last year’s nuclear catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. His photographs were some of the most stark and significant images I had seen [...]

If the Chinese middle class permits

Bill Saporito’s October 31 Time article said it best: “Consider the cosmic irony: wobbly Western economies are depending on the Chinese Communist Party to save their capitalist bacon. Likewise, the Chinese government’s grand scheme to rebalance its economy hinges on Western-style materialism.” “Shop ’til you drop” probably isn’t what Mao Zedong had in mind during the years [...]

“I want to say, this machine isn’t just history.” The garment industry in history, and in our lives today

If you ever complain about the price of your jeans, I want you to find a sewing machine and try to hem a pair. Granted, the industrial size and strength of the machines they use to produce them on a large scale is much greater than my personal machine, but I hemmed a pair last night and [...]

Trying to understand a boiling water reactor schematic diagram, to begin to understand Japan’s situation

If you’re like me, i.e. NOT a nuclear physicist, all the coverage of the quickly-deteriorating nuclear situation in Fukushima has gone a bit over your head. Not that you’re not a compassionate, intelligent person, but man, can those experts on the radio and television talk fast and loose with terms like “partial-meltdown”–which it turns out [...]

Shaolin Temple in the spotlight, and its role in one of the best days of my life

This morning I was reading my copy of the current National Geographic, and the standout piece was the story and photographs of the Shaolin Temple, which stands in the midst of the Song Mountains in Henan Province, China. The temple is serving as both an important component of a resurgence of popularity of kung fu and martial [...]

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