Doh (a short video).

You know what's a good reason not to start shaving? Because if you haven't clean-shaven for a long time, and then you do, it itches like hell the next day when the hairs start to grow back. Holy shit ( Read more... )

No, I'm not talking about the Newsweek cover or Google or any of that. I'm talking about how my two favorite English-language China-related blogs, ESWN and Beijing or Bust, have both run into problems recently. The ESWN guy took a job in NY and says he won't be translating long essays anymore ( Read more... )

Look, here he is making a speech you're not allowed to hear as he wins an award for a movie you're not allowed to watch.

My updates get shorter and shorter today. For number three, I just want to recommend this short article on the state of Hollywood by Manohla Dargis. I'm not entirely comfortable with the conclusion she draws in the end, but Dargis is ridiculously good at what she does, and when she says, "This is the state of the movie industry today," it's worth

I finished Oe's Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!, which is a largely autobiographical account of Oe's relationship with his brain-damaged son. And as much as I've been thinking about imagination recently in an abstract way, reading the afterword by the translator, John Nathan, suggests that Oe's and Blake's idea of imagination is much more ( Read more... )

Are thing more simple or more complicated than we make them? People tell me I overcomplicate everything. For this semi-political project I’m working on, I’ve started to write a paper about the semiotic nature of political apologies-in other words, what exactly does it mean when one political entity apologizes to another, or to “the people,” or to ( Read more... )

I listened to a conversation recently about the institution of greatest moments in people's lives. Actually, it wasn't so much about the institution as it was about actual supposed greatest moments. It was a short conversation in which I didn't participate much, but it got me thinking, and that night when I went home I wrote down what my answer ( Read more... )

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Language Log has an entry on the silliness of thinking you can recover sounds from pottery. At the end is a long quote from chapter nine of something called the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, by Charles Babbage ( Read more... )