Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone

Picture this.  A top official of a powerful state newspaper stands before a room of journalism students and flatly admits that their government has been lying to them, changing facts in the news or omitting them altogether.  The hero of a dystopian novel?  A whistle-blower who’s had enough? Just the opposite.  Xia Lin, the deputy editor-in-chief of Xinhua, the mouthpiece... Read More

The Rabbit Hole

It’s been almost one month since Tim Burton became dead to me. For ten years I was a devoted follower of his work despite admonitions from friends and family that his movies were “weird.” There are more than enough reviews of Alice in Wonderland floating around the internet so all I will say is I was shocked that Alice is what Burton made with $200 million and... Read More

A Veiled Issue

“There is a real concern the face veil and issues like it will be used as an election tool.” - Shaista Gohir, executive director at Muslim Women’s Network UK; Source: BBC A French parliamentary committee has been convened to discuss the status of the Islamic face veil worn by women—an accessory which, according to President Nicolas Sarkozy is “not welcome”... Read More

Powering the Future

The Obama Administration and Congress must work together to establish a five-year “Bucks for Belchers” Program modeled on “Cash for Clunkers.” Half of our electricity and a third of our carbon dioxide emissions come from coal-fired power plants. “These coal fire plants are going to continue to operate for decades, even as our industry turns to carbon-free... Read More

Year-end Check Up

Karl Marx famously postulated that capitalism was a step on the road to socialism, but looking at the world today, one gets the impression that the road goes both ways. In America, a country that ostensibly sees life as an unalienable right, the battle over universal health care rages on, framed correctly but maliciously as a step toward socialism. But China, the only major “socialist”... Read More

Playground Politics

A 10-year-old Arkansas boy named Will Phillips has refused to stand up in class and recite the pledge of allegiance as he feels that gays are not allowed to get married and are not included as part of a nation that provides ”liberty and justice for all.” - Fridae My first instinct: well done, young sir! I commend your brave and principled political stand against the forces... Read More

The Game of Life

[We] call upon game producers to consequently and creatively incorporate rules of international humanitarian law and human rights into their games. - BBC News Two Swiss human rights organizations have slammed a series of war-related strategy and FPS games for permitting violence against civilians, including torture and massacres. They added that those who “violate international... Read More

Writer’s Block

There is a Chinese idiom about a man who buried a sum of silver underground and, worried that passersby would find it, placed a sign next to the plot that read “ci di wu yin san bai liang,” or “There is not 300 liang of silver here.”  Needless to say, the next day his silver was gone. I wonder if the censorship bureau understands this parable because one... Read More

Homogenizing News

This article is part of a continuing discussion, with Oscar Moralde. I had a very frustrating conversation with a Chinese woman once. She was a bright, intelligent person, web-savvy (she was a computer programmer), and on her way to Redmond to work at Microsoft. We began talking about the news, and I may have said some disparaging things about the reliability of the Chinese media.... Read More

The End of Free News

Recently, there’s been quite a spate of articles proclaiming the death of news as we know it. Newspapers are teetering on the edge of financial insolvency, shedding staff like bad dandruff, and bemoaning the popularity of aggregation sites like The Huffington Post (or, for example, our own site). A number of suggestions have been floated to solve the problem, mostly involving... Read More