Execution of British National
On December 29, 2009, China executed by lethal injection Akmal Shaikh, a British national convicted of smuggling 9 pounds of heroin into the country, despite repeated pleas for clemency due to Shaikh’s...
View ArticleREPOST: Mad Women
In honor of Kathryn Bigelow’s historic achievement in being the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, this is a repost of my article about women in Hollywood, originally posted in...
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Reflections on a Thunder Emperor
Customized Lady Gaga Barbie dolls, designed by a 29-year-old Beijinger I’ve made no secret of my hatred for Graydon Carter’s society rag Vanity Fair, so guess what happened when I opened its September...
View ArticleSeeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
(with apologies to Lawrence Weschler) Imagine our national media as the population’s mental landscape. What’s playing in the cinemas and on our televisions reflects something about our collective...
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3D is the New Color
In The City (La ciudad), a 1999 drama film directed by David Riker, we get an unvarnished, unsentimental look at the plight of Hispanic immigrants in New York: language barriers, alienation and...
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I Hate The Big Bang Theory
No, I’m not talking about the actual theory, which is the first joke that people make when I say that; I’m talking about television here. I understand that “hate” may be too strong of a word to deploy...
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Office Politics
The latest episode of NBC’s The Office (Thursdays, 9 PM) entitled “China” uses Michael (Steve Carell) and his newfound fear of China’s economic power as the launching point for its storyline. It’s...
View ArticleA Slightly Late Response
James Zadroga was a NYPD officer and one of the police, fire, and paramedic first responders to the attacks at the World Trade Center on 9/11. He died in 2006; the cause was in dispute but is believed...
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In the Realm of Forms
In the formative decades of cinema, the national film industries of the world were veritable cauldrons of experimentation: laboratories in which the limits of the cinematic form in terms of...
View ArticleUCLA’s Asian Racist
Alexandra Wallace, the so-called “Asian Racist,” is a political science student at UCLA who uploaded a YouTube video complaining about Asians talking on their cell phones in the library. The video has...
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