Archive for the ‘Capitalismo’ Category
Ai Weiwei: A game of chess and China’s elemental flaw
Ai Weiwei’s self portrait for the Time Person of the Year issue I have been fascinated by Ai Weiwei, the 54-year-old provocative artist and voice of dissidence in China, since May, when I heard an interview with his English translator on one of the my favorite podcasts. He was detained and questioned and kept by the government for 81 [...]
December 26th, 2011If the Chinese middle class permits
The expanding Chinese middle class has more money to spend on tourism, like this family in Nanjing, June 2007. 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 [...]
November 14th, 2011“I want to say, this machine isn’t just history.” The garment industry in history, and in our lives today
A denim factory in Kaiping, in southern China, where whole days are spent doing what I could barely do for two hours. Photo by Bert van Dijk. 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 [...]
April 11th, 2011A city, not a blank slate. More like “an empty and brightly lit stage with lots of directors, scripts, auditions, designers, audiences, and reviewers.”
I haven’t written recently, but it has not been for lack of compelling ideas and discussion in my classes and reading. It has been in fact because of too much of it, alongside a new, second job that I have taken on, and the regularly hefty amount of school work. But I just finished another book for class, that [...]
February 19th, 2011Through the Disney lens
Atlanta got about five inches of snow last night, and in a city with very little equipment for clearing the roads and a populace that doesn’t often drive in snow, it means the entire city pretty much took a snow day. The free day allowed me time to finish up some projects around the apartment, [...]
January 11th, 2011“You’re a wizard, Harry.”
Honeyduke’s, where I bought a Chocolate Frog for my brother and took in the whole whimsical place. Very few people get to experience their favorite fairy tale world in real life. Unless you happen to be in a movie made by Tim Burton or your imagination is made in the physical world at an amusement [...]
January 10th, 2011“If men were angels, we would need no government”
Madison,"father of the Consitution," wrote a large portion of the Federalist Papers and is one of the founding fathers. He believed man needed government, and even that it could coexist with personal liberty, if done right. So spoke James Madison, on that every pressing question of what to do with governance; how much is good [...]
October 14th, 2010To combat a recession: retail tactics and the mall wake-up call
For most large retailers, the last thirty years has been about stretching as far across mid-land America as possible, opening stores in malls on the fringes of big cities and in mid-size towns and communities, homogenizing the landscapes and centralizing decisions so that in most of the country, men, women, teenagers, and children could enjoy [...]
October 2nd, 2010Beijing’s vanishing charm: for a buck, for better living conditions, and for a hefty price
Chicken coup, built atop a home inside a Beijing hutong It’s a bit mysterious to me how my fascination with China began; this far into it, I cant quite retrace the steps back to the beginning. But one of the first books I read about the country was journalist Ian Johnson’s Wild Grass: Three Portraits [...]
July 21st, 2010We spill our hearts, to Google
Infamous for its simple homepage About a month ago, I was flipping channels and found myself watching an extended news program on Google and the history of the search engine. In one sense, it was a brilliant business idea to arise at a time when people were trying to figure out what the heck you [...]
June 11th, 2010