There has been a bit of bally-hoo in the press about China putting an end to US Olympic dominance, a dominance which doesn’t seem to jibe with history. I took a look at the medal counts for the Summer Olympics, and since 1956 (not counting the boycott years of 1980 and 1984, a total of 11 Olympics) [...]
Beijing 2008: The end of US, erm, dominance?
August 14th, 2008 · 11 Comments
Tags: 2008 Olympics
The hutong and a review of Michael Meyer, The Last Days of Old Beijing
August 14th, 2008 · 1 Comment
This month YJ and I moved from a monstrous soul-sucking xiaoqu near Guijie to a quiet little pingfang off one of the Dongsi hutongs. Never has moving two kilometers meant such a radical change in quality of life. Note the phrase ‘quality of life’ rather than ‘standard of living,’ a distinction reinforced for me on [...]
Tags: Beijing Journal · Chinese History · Recommended Readings
Social networking and the teacher/student relationship
August 14th, 2008 · 4 Comments
Quick confession: I’m on Facebook. I joined last year and found it a great way to keep in touch with friends back home and to catch up with classmates I hadn’t seen in a decade or more. But in this day and age it was only a matter of time before my students here in [...]
Tags: Life in Academia
