Jottings from the Granite Studio

East Shore Jazz Club on Qianhai is one of my new favorite spots and by the look of the house last night, it’s probably one of yours too. Jazz pianist Bob King played a crazy set in which he deconstructed any number of jazz classics. It was atonal, challenging, and wonderful. Unfortunately I have a […]

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Last September, a new set of history textbooks for use in Shanghai public schools set off quite a stir. So stirring in fact, that the new texts–which downplayed Marxist teleology among other changes–got pulled almost immediately.
Li Datong, a historian and former editor of Freezing Point 冰点, has a new essay up on openDemocracy.net that […]

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Welcome to Tiαnαnmen Square. Note the museum on the east side and the Great Hall of the People to the west. The increasingly skinny old fellow in the glass case in the center used to run the place. Oh yeah, and on Jυne 4, 1989 nothing happened here. It was just another summer day in […]

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From the Shenzhen Daily:

Veteran journalist Li Yuanjiang, who founded China’s first press group and was later sentenced to prison for accepting bribes, has become the first person in Guangdong to complete a Ph.D. in prison.
Li, former president of the Guangzhou Daily Press Group, has so far served three years of a 12-year term in Sihui […]

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YJ just sent me a new fix that seems to work on ALL blocked sites in China, even system-level blocks. It’s called Hotspot Shield by Anchor Software and appears originally designed to hide IP addresses and other information for travelers using WiFi in airports and the like. The ability to view blocked sites seems […]

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After months of planning, YJ and I finally tied the knot on September 8th in Tianjin. YJ looked beautiful (of course) and I tried to keep up with all that was happening. We hired a bus to take our friends from Beijing to Tianjin for the evening wedding and our good friend Nels arranged cocktails […]

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Fascinating essay in the Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section this past Sunday written by Yale Professor Anthony Kronman. Professor Kronman argues that American universities have given up on teaching the big, fundamental questions to their students in favor of specialized, practical, subject-based curriculum in increasing vogue over the past century. What is the meaning of life […]

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With all of the musicians out there Daoist or Buddhist influences to their music, where’s the love for the C-Man?…The brilliant (and it would appear slightly twisted) mind of Sam Crane at The Useless Tree has placed Linkin Park frontman Mike Shinoda (A.k.a. Fort Minor) into the Confucian pantheon. It’s a song made famous by […]

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I spent yesterday cruising around the hutongs with a group of my students as well as our program director and Fang Laoshi, a descendant of Manchu bannermen and a real Beijing history buff. Fang Laoshi was a treasure trove of information as we wound our way down Chang’an Dajie, through Tiananmen, up to Houhai and […]

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Interesting post on the academic blog, New Kid on the Hallway (”The Glory of Progress“) about the tendency by students and even some scholars to assume that because people from the past didn’t write what we would write or think the way we would think, that somehow this means they were…well, not as smart as […]

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