Michelle Wang įįžį has an editorial in the Taipei Times, entitled “Looking at the recall bid with a foreign eye.” The point of the article is to show that the current KMT recall strategy (see here for some background) is a dangerously undemocratic strategy that would never be acceptable in an advanced democracy like America. [...]
That organized crime controls New York and New Jersey’s waterfront is not news. Elia Kazan’s classic 1954 film On the Waterfront (filmed around Hoboken, where I grew up) depicts the (true) story of one man who took on the mob, but as William Finnegan’s excellent New Yorker story “Watching the Waterfront” (print only) shows, little [...]
Fellow Savage Mind, Alex Golub, was interviewed extensively for this excellent article in the Ottawa Citizen about conflict between a Canadian mining company and the local population in Papua New Guinea (where Alex did his fieldwork): And so the stage was set for the tragedy that is Porgera: On the one side, hundreds of people [...]
I’m inclined to agree with Jonathan Freedland when he argues that the gay marriage amendment is little more than a red herring. This is backed up by evidence that the failure to actually deliver on this will only further alienate the very people it is intended to appease. Given that the estate tax might be [...]
Years ago I read a paper* about politics and architecture in Taipei which pointed out (among other things) the ways in which architecture and writing play out in the urban landscape. Mark at Pinyin News has used Google Earth to show exactly how these buildings look from the sky. (Which is the only way to [...]
In this part of the world, MIT stands for “Made in Taiwan.” Today I just learned (via Jason at Wandering to Tamshui) that one of Taiwan’s number one exports is SPAM. I really like the title of Jason’s post. If you don’t get it, watch this. Actually, it isn’t clear if the Taiwanese are actually [...]
A lot has been written about Las Meninas by Velazquez, most notably Foucault in The Order of Things, and later Searle’s response in “Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation.” It has also been copied and emulated by numerous painters, such as Picasso. So I was surprised to learn recently that the painting originally [...]