Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Copyright Time

I gave the president my book. He raised an eyebrow. “Who wrote this for ya, Geldof?” he said without looking up from the cover. Very dry. “Who will you get to read it for you, Mr. President?” I replied. No response.

The Most Powerful Man in the World studied the front cover. Geldof in Africa — ” ‘The international best seller.’ You write that bit yourself?”

“That’s right. It’s called marketing. Something you obviously have no clue about or else I wouldn’t have to be here telling people your Africa story.”

It is some story. And I have always wondered why it was never told properly to the American people, who were paying for it. It was, for example, Bush who initiated the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) with cross-party support led by Senators John Kerry and Bill Frist. In 2003, only 50,000 Africans were on HIV antiretroviral drugs — and they had to pay for their own medicine. Today, 1.3 million are receiving medicines free of charge. The U.S. also contributes one-third of the money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria — which treats another 1.5 million. It contributes 50% of all food aid (though some critics find the mechanism of contribution controversial). On a seven-day trip through Africa, Bush announced a fantastic new $350 million fund for other neglected tropical diseases that can be easily eradicated; a program to distribute 5.2 million mosquito nets to Tanzanian kids; and contracts worth around $1.2 billion in Tanzania and Ghana from the Millennium Challenge Account, another initiative of the Bush Administration.

So why doesn’t America know about this? “I tried to tell them. But the press weren’t much interested,” says Bush. It’s half true. There are always a couple of lines in the State of the Union, but not enough so that anyone noticed, and the press really isn’t interested. For them, like America itself, Africa is a continent of which little is known save the odd horror.

We sat in the large, wood-paneled conference room of Air Force One as she cruised the skies of the immense African continent below us. Gathered around the great oval table, I wondered how changed was the man who said in 2000 that Africa “doesn’t fit into the national strategic interests, as far as I can see them.”

“Hold on a minute. I said that in response to a military question. Condi! Canya get in here,” the President shouts out the open door, leaning back in his chair. The Secretary of State, looking glamorous and fresh despite having been diverted to Kenya to articulate the U.S.’s concern over matters there before jetting back to Rwanda to join her boss, sits down. “Hi, Bob.” “Hi, Condi.” It’s like being inside a living TV screen.

Bush asks whether she remembers the context of the 2000 question. She confirms it was regarding the U.S.’s military strategies inside Africa, but then 2000 was so long ago. Another universe. I ask him if it is the same today. “Yes, sir,” he says. “Well, if America has no military interest in Africa, then what is Africom for?” I ask.

People in Africa are worried about this new, seemingly military command. I thought it was an inappropriate and knee-jerk U.S. militaristic response to clumsy Chinese mercantilism that could only end in tears for everyone concerned. (And so did many Africans, if the local press was anything to go by.)

“That’s ridiculous,” says Bush. “We’re still working on it. We’re trying to build a humanitarian mission that would train up soldiers for peace and security so that African nations are more capable of dealing with Africa’s conflicts. You agree with that dontcha?” Indeed I do. The British intervention in Sierra Leone stopped and prevented a catastrophe, as did U.S. action in Liberia. Later, in public, Bush says, “I want to dispel the notion that all of a sudden America is bringing all kinds of military to Africa. It’s simply not true … That’s baloney, or as we say in Texas — that’s bull!” Trouble is, it sounds to me a lot like what the U.S. did in the early Vietnam years with the advisers who became something else. Mission creep, I think it’s called.

“No, that won’t happen,” Bush insists. “We’re still working on what exactly it’ll be, but it will be a humanitarian mission, training in peace and security, conflict resolution … It’s a new concept and we want to get it right.” He muses for a while on the U.S. and China, and their policies on Africa — Africans are increasingly resentful that the Chinese bring their own labor force and supplies with them. Then, in what I took to be a reference to the supposed Chinese influence over the cynical Khartoum regime, Bush adds, “One thing I will say: Human suffering should preempt commercial interest.”

It’s a wonderful sentence, and it comes in the wake of a visit to Rwanda’s Genocide Memorial Center. The museum is built on the site of a still-being-filled open grave. There are 250,000 individuals in that hole, tumbled together in an undifferentiated tangle of humanity. The President and First Lady were visibly shocked by the museum. “Evil does exist,” Bush says in reaction to the 1994 massacres. “And in such a brutal form.” He is not speechifying; he is horror-struck by the reality of ethnic madness. “Babies had their skulls smashed,” he says, his mind violently regurgitating an image he has just witnessed. The sentence peters out, emptied of words to describe the ultimately incomprehensible.

Rwanda brings him back again to Darfur. In an interview with African journalists, Bush explained the difficulties there now that the “rebels” had broken up into ever-smaller factions, no longer representing their own clans but their own warlord interests. What should we do in this very 21st century asymmetric situation? Impose a wall of peacekeepers first, stop the massacre and rape, and begin negotiating? “The U.N. is so slow, but we must act,” Bush says.

Action may very well be his wish, but because of the U.S.’s intervention elsewhere and his own preemptive philosophy, it is now unacceptable for the U.S. to engage unilaterally. By his own deeds, he has rendered U.S. action in Darfur impossible. As for the rest of the world, for all their oft-spoken pieties, they seem to be able to agree on precisely nothing. Meanwhile, the rape and killing continue, Khartoum plays its game of murder and we won’t even pay for the helicopters that the U.N. forces need to protect themselves. Pathetic.

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Posted at 12:32 AM · Comments (1)

LETTER FROM ASIA
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Letter from Asia
By Howard W. French
February 28, 2008

HANOI: A seductive idea has taken hold in certain foreign policy circles in recent years that suggests the best way to deal with a fast-rising China is to build ad hoc coalitions of the country’s neighbors to constrain or somehow encircle it.

While never openly espoused by any government, the idea has tempted foreign policy thinkers not just in the United States, but in Japan and to a lesser degree perhaps Australia, too.

It is not hard to understand why, either, for the thought is beautiful in its simplicity. And while no one in a position of responsibility in any of these countries has started calling China an enemy, it is based on an ancient principle: that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

That this schema has never gotten very far off the ground has more than one cause.

First is China’s own diplomatic skill in foreseeing the risk of encirclement and working assiduously to disarm it.

Globalization is important, too. Whether by dint of strategy or happenstance, the rise of China as an exporting powerhouse, combined with the relative openness of the Chinese economy, has created ever stronger linkages with the international economy, giving other countries, not least China’s neighbors, a vital stake in its prospects.

The contrast with the rise of another East Asian manufacturing behemoth, Japan in the 1980s, couldn’t be more striking. Japan’s growth then was overwhelmingly seen as coming at the expense of competitors in the United States and in Europe. And because Japan never truly embraced foreign investment, few outsiders shared in the dividends from its rise.

The idea of encircling China has run into other problems, too. Quite early on, important neighbors like South Korea made it clear that they would have no part of a tacit coalition against - or perhaps in reaction to - the rise of their giant and traditionally influential neighbor.

Well before the Americans came around to the view, the South Koreans understood they needed China to help manage North Korea’s vexed transition toward a more peaceful, prosperous and open future.

China’s willingness to play a leading role in the diplomacy around the question of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program has been the political equivalent of Beijing’s enthusiasm for globalization, improving China’s standing in the world and returning it to its historical status as this region’s indispensable power, to paraphrase Madeleine Albright’s description of the United States’ place in the world.

One turns next to India, whose enthusiasm for things American is as high as it comes but stops well short of anything that even hints at a compact to contain China. Where South Koreans have historically been cautious balancers, weighing more powerful neighbors off against each other, never wanting to get too close to any one of them, India sees itself a great civilization and global power in waiting.

India has disappointingly given little indication of the uses to which it will apply this new power, should it materialize, but when one combines its belief in its own destiny with its deep seated ideology of nonalignment, it becomes hard to imagine India casting its lot with anybody - least of all against China, with whom its relations are already complicated enough.

Mention of these complications is actually where the containment theory meets its biggest obstacle: the common-sense observation that China’s relations with its most important neighbors are already seriously fraught, to the point where there is no benefit to be gained from working or even appearing to work to complicate things further.

Look around China’s periphery and quickly understand why. China fought a brief but fierce border war with India in 1960s, and the two countries - putative future rivals - have never come to terms about the disputed territory.

In the northeast, China faces claims from the two Koreas that it has absorbed traditionally Korean lands and distorted the history of an ancient Korean kingdom in order to cover its tracks.

To the east, China faces a dispute with Japan over maritime boundaries in an area thought to be rich in oil and gas. Ironically, given the longtime animosity between Beijing and Tokyo, of all of China’s disputes with its neighbors, today this one looks like the most manageable.

Washington may make all the noise about Islamic fundamentalism, but its problems pale in comparison with China’s, whose Muslim far west abuts restive Pakistan and Afghanistan and seethes with resentment toward Beijing.

Longer-term problems loom all along China’s other frontiers, too, starting with the vast northern border with Russia. Moscow and Beijing would seem to be getting along fine these days, notably working well together to hinder the United States, whether over its perceived unilateralism or its encouragement of democracy. The population of Russia, however, is in steep decline, and Russians are deeply wary of what some fear could be a creeping Chinese annexation of scantly populated regions in the Russian east.

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Posted at 11:38 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
February 26, 2008
SHANGHAI — One of China’s best-known human rights lawyers has been repeatedly beaten by police officers outside his home here in recent days, according to his wife and associates.

The lawyer, Zheng Enchong, who has lived under house arrest for several months, has been seriously injured by plainclothes police officers who, in one attack, knocked him down, then repeatedly hoisted his body parallel to the ground and dropped him on the concrete, people who have visited him said. He has been seen walking with a limp.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Zheng’s wife, Jiang Meili, described another beating, which she said took place as her husband tried to leave his house for church. “A guy stopped him and pushed him to the ground,” Ms. Jiang said. “One man held him by the neck, while another kneed him in the stomach. Then five or six men carried him back upstairs, beating him in the elevator, too.”

Shanghai police officials declined to comment.

Ms. Jiang said the beatings represented a sharp escalation of a recent campaign by the Shanghai authorities to silence Mr. Zheng. Associates who have spoken with him say the beatings started after he began advising residents who had organized a campaign against a high-tech railroad that would cut through middle-class areas of the city.

Others said Mr. Zheng had also recently spoken of details of what he called evidence of high-level corruption in Shanghai involving real estate speculation and influence peddling. “They’ve been very annoyed by this,” Mr. Zheng’s wife said.

The government is struggling with competing priorities as it works to put on its best face for the world as the host of the Olympic Games. It appears eager to eliminate dissent but would like to avoid being tagged as a gross violator of human rights.

Mr. Zheng’s corruption allegations, according to other human rights lawyers, have focused on Huang Ju, a deputy prime minister who died last year, as well as sons of former President Jiang Zemin. Mr. Jiang, who was once Communist Party secretary for the city, developed Shanghai into a personal power base.

For more than a year, Shanghai has been the scene of an embarrassing municipal corruption scandal. Its highest-ranked figure to fall is Chen Liangyu, a Communist Party secretary who has been in detention since September 2006.

Posted at 11:43 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Nation (Kenya)

Story by KEN KAMOCHE
2/24/2008

Becoming a major player on the world stage is not for the faint-hearted or the paranoid. For centuries, China kept itself isolated, afraid of contamination from the barbarians.

In recent decades, however, China has struggled not just for acceptance into the international community, but for recognition. First as the spokesperson for the developing world and more recently, as a power in its own right.

But what role exactly does China wish to play on the global stage, a stage that has seen entities like the former-USSR disintegrate and fade away into oblivion as the Cold War drew to an end?

China sees itself filling in a void that yawns wider by the day as both Russia and the European bloc of nations fail to provide a credible countervailing force to America’s hegemony.

But how well prepared is China for the sort of prominent role that super-powers crave? China might well enjoy economic prowess that shatters one record after another, from biggest this to fastest that.

However, respect from the rest of the international community doesn’t come from creating super-multinational firms, having the fastest growth rates, or being the largest consumer of resources and hence the world’s largest polluter. Respect, credibility and acceptance come from a morally-sustainable position that relates to global leadership, social justice, peace and goodwill.

The first real test for China has to be Africa, in particular its handling of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, as well as its handling of the strongmen in Myanmar. China buys a third of Sudan’s oil exports and is a major investor in neighbouring Myanmar.

Trade pragmatism taking precedence over everything else might be good for economic statistics, but it raises questions about a country’s sensitivity to the plight of those who suffer repression in the hands of rogue regimes.

If China could stop hiding behind the so-called non-interference principle, and exercise a little more of its clout with Myanmar and Sudan, its credibility would be substantially enhanced.

This is where concerns about China’s ability to handle criticism become important. The imminent Beijing Olympics have already generated a fair bit of controversy with the inevitable linking of sports to politics, something China rejects. Yet, as far as I know, China was among the nations that boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Iran and China, citing “political reasons”. On that occasion, China seemed untroubled by the link between politics and sports.

China should not be surprised if critics now link the Beijing games to China’s policy on Darfur. In both cases, the political issues touch on the much-vaunted national sovereignty and reflect a widely shared revulsion at the widespread abuse of human rights.

The critics that China is taking exception to include high-profile entertainers like Bono, Mia Farrow, George Clooney and Steven Spielberg, who has withdrawn his involvement in the games thus incurring the wrath of Beijing. Nobel Peace Prize laureates like Desmond Tutu have also added their voices.

The games will in all likelihood go according to plan. China will obviously do well and set new records in the medal haul. National pride will run high, the 5,000-year-old civilisation will announce its arrival on the world stage, on its own soil, in the most majestic way imaginable.

The withdrawal of the Swiss dressage team from the equestrian events to be held in Hong Kong due to concerns about the summer conditions, and Haile Gebrselassie’s threats not to participate on health grounds have generated some adverse publicity for the games.

The pressure is intensifying, and the leaders in Beijing need to realise that this is not just a chance to showcase national prowess.

In fact, any excessive jingoistic displays of national pride of the type we have come to expect from other superpowers, coupled with a failure to use that high-profile clout to bring pressure to bear on Sudan and Myanmar, will, if anything, generate more negative sentiments towards China.

China’s response so far has been to meet criticism with criticism while reiterating the material support they have given to the people of Darfur.

It is not enough, and it shows that China needs a little more experience in handling criticism as it takes on a larger role in global affairs. Paranoia and defensiveness will not help.

It is regrettable that Africa in particular has to look to China for some form of leadership in this crisis. It is as though Africa itself has no voice, no courage, and no commitment to challenge a rogue regime that exists in its very heart.

In the past, when the African political landscape was littered with dictators, the non-interference principle served as a convenient ploy to protect would-be human rights abusers from criticism.

Today, we have a critical mass of legitimate administrations and respected leaders to spearhead measures that will bring about a resolution to the Darfur crisis. That Africa has risen to Kenya’s help in its moment of need shows that it can be done. Africa can solve its own problems. Unfortunately, Darfur has been allowed to fester, as has Zimbabwe.

Ken Kamoche is the author of A Fragile Hope, which has just been shortlisted for the Commonwealth First Book Award.

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Posted at 9:49 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Smart Set
An excerpt:

… It makes me wonder where Hadley Freeman has been all my life. (Writing for the Guardian, apparently.) Her new book The Meaning of Sunglasses: And a Guide to Almost All Things Fashionable will not make you feel worse about the state of your thighs, nor your brain. Freeman namedrops Andrea Dworkin and poet Joseph Parisi as often as she does Anna Wintour. She’s the one you want on the other side of the changing room, not Redstone. If you came out looking cheap, she would grab you by the shoulders, turn you around, and demand you change immediately. As she writes in the section labeled “Cleavage, and the plumbing of depths,” “Show me a woman with a good three inches of cleavage on display, and I’ll show you a woman who, rightly or wrongly, has little faith in her powers of conversation.”

Freeman wrote a book for women who actually exist. Women who have to wait for buses in the middle of winter. Women who like to dance at parties, and do not want to have to sit in the corner because their feet are bleeding. She knows that these women live in the real world, where fur is not harvested from free-range chinchillas that all die of natural causes (see “Fur: bad”).

She also knows that clothing is not about a set of rules or dressing to please men. “Fashion should be about self-expression, and if your self has a little more going for it than worrying about what pleases either of the two pillars of fashion dictatorship – men’s mags (tight, short, available) or TV-style makeover shows (fluted sleeves, bias cuts, unthreatening) – then flaunt it to the world, and if they don’t like it, that’s just too bad.”

If more fashion writing was done in the tone of smartypants Freeman, we could avoid the fear that caring about our appearance makes us a vain fool or a victim. A work colleague recently took one look at the four-inch peep toe heels I was wearing and snarled, “Don’t you know why men invented high heels?” I doubted anything I said would deflect what was coming next, so I just shrugged. “So you can’t run away when they want to rape you.” I understand. I used to be a humorless feminist, too, complete with shaved head and my father’s combat boots. Then I discovered Charles David heels and got over it. If only The Meaning of Sunglasses had existed sooner, I could have spent less time being a self-righteous twit. • 20 February 2008

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Posted at 8:29 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

An excerpt:

… Clinton and her advisers also misread where African Americans are in 2008.

Once upon a time, all a white politician had to do to win black votes was to be on good terms with the Congressional Black Caucus, suck up to black pastors and flatter their choirs on Sunday morning, and, oh, yeah, spread around a little money leading up to Election Day.

Those days are coming to an end.

Such condescension today is offensive to African Americans, who expect to be treated as thinking adults.

Equally off-putting was the Clintons’ assertion, once Obama’s black support became evident, that his pigmentation was the reason — as if African Americans are so color-struck that in a contest between a white and a black candidate, any black face will do.

The record shows otherwise.

Nearly half of the primary electorate in South Carolina, where Obama trounced Clinton, is black. That didn’t stop John Edwards from defeating Al Sharpton in 2004, 45 percent to 10 percent. The results were virtually the same for Sharpton in Virginia and Georgia in 2004 — states Obama carried handily this year.

Racial pride is not without limits. Whatever Al Sharpton’s contributions to civil rights, most African American voters simply didn’t see him as presidential material and voted accordingly.

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Posted at 5:53 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post
Friday, February 22, 2008

We’re all pretty much the same except, of course, for the little things that make us different.

Those are the conclusions of three studies published this week that looked at human diversity through the keyhole of the genetic mutations we all carry.

The findings — the latest dividend from the world’s investment in the Human Genome Project in the 1990s — confirm a broad narrative of human history known from previous biological, archaeological and linguistic studies. But the new research adds an astonishing level of detail and a few new insights that were not previously available.

All three studies support the idea that modern human beings left East Africa, walked into Central Asia and then fanned out east and west to people the entire planet. The studies also confirm earlier research showing that as a group, Africans have more diverse genes than people of other continents. But the new research further shows that genetic diversity declines steadily the farther one’s ancestors traveled from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which is roughly the site of the exit turnstile for the “out-of-Africa” migration.

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Posted at 10:57 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post
Friday, February 22, 2008

We’re all pretty much the same except, of course, for the little things that make us different.

Those are the conclusions of three studies published this week that looked at human diversity through the keyhole of the genetic mutations we all carry.

The findings — the latest dividend from the world’s investment in the Human Genome Project in the 1990s — confirm a broad narrative of human history known from previous biological, archaeological and linguistic studies. But the new research adds an astonishing level of detail and a few new insights that were not previously available.

All three studies support the idea that modern human beings left East Africa, walked into Central Asia and then fanned out east and west to people the entire planet. The studies also confirm earlier research showing that as a group, Africans have more diverse genes than people of other continents. But the new research further shows that genetic diversity declines steadily the farther one’s ancestors traveled from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which is roughly the site of the exit turnstile for the “out-of-Africa” migration.

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Posted at 10:57 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Atlantic

About six months after my son was born, he and I were sitting on a blanket at the park with a close friend and her daughter. It was a sunny summer weekend, and other parents and their kids picnicked nearby—mothers munching berries and lounging on the grass, fathers tossing balls with their giddy toddlers. My friend and I, who, in fits of self-empowerment, had conceived our babies with donor sperm because we hadn’t met Mr. Right yet, surveyed the idyllic scene.

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“Ah, this is the dream,” I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then burst out laughing. In some ways, I meant it: we’d both dreamed of motherhood, and here we were, picnicking in the park with our children. But it was also decidedly not the dream. The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).

To the outside world, of course, we still call ourselves feminists and insist—vehemently, even—that we’re independent and self-sufficient and don’t believe in any of that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family. And despite growing up in an era when the centuries-old mantra to get married young was finally (and, it seemed, refreshingly) replaced by encouragement to postpone that milestone in pursuit of high ideals (education! career! but also true love!), every woman I know—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.

Posted at 8:17 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Los Angeles Times

I miss Hillary Clinton already. Not her creepy laugh, or the way she tried to bring back the pantsuit, or that point-clap-nod thing she does at rallies as if she’s Chris Penn learning to dance in “Footloose.”

Hillary is fading so fast in the Democratic primary — losing 11 straight contests — that I’m suffering from pre-nostalgia. Having her around made me feel comfortable. I need to know the world is full of Hillaries — detail-obsessed, rule-following grinders. People who will clean up the messes created by people like me, who will do the hard detail work and, most important, who will get really upset whenever the rest of us do anything fun. Basically, copy editors.

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Posted at 6:45 PM · Comments (0)

LETTER FROM CHINA
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
Published: February 21, 2008

SHANGHAI: Something powerful happened on President George W. Bush’s way to Africa.

Listening to Bush’s statements in appearance after appearance, one gets the impression of a major diplomatic shift. It is as if a switch had been flipped, relegating the ever-present war on terror to the background and emphasizing classical, uplifting themes with roots in the U.S. Great Society era of the 1960s.

There was the president, speaking forcefully in Tanzania about long-held American values; not just freedom as an obligatory throw away line, but of democracy in terms of good governance, and of the importance of heeding the people and serving their needs.

“I’ll put it bluntly - America doesn’t want to spend money on people who steal the money from the people,” Bush said, addressing the news media together with his Tanzanian counterpart, Jakaya Kikwete.

“We like dealing with honest people and compassionate people,” he added. “We want our money to go to help the human condition and to live human lives.”

Bush then lent credence to his rhetoric by bestowing a generous aid package on Tanzania, including $662 million for this year and $698 million more over the next five years to upgrade electricity, water supply and roads, through a U.S. agency called the Millennium Challenge Corporation, whose funds are aimed toward countries that demonstrate good governance. All of this on top of big spending for AIDS and malaria prevention.

Beyond the words and the cash, the very logic of Bush’s itinerary is illuminating. In six days, in addition to Tanzania, he is visiting Benin, Ghana, and Liberia, all of which are small democracies, and post-genocide Rwanda, which although not democratic, has established a reputation for clean, effective government.

The symbolism was strengthened by the fact that none of Bush’s stops are in Africa’s emerging natural resource powerhouses: important yet highly corrupt places like Nigeria, Angola and Congo, to name three of the biggest, which either lack democracy altogether, or have recently suffered erosion in their democratic credentials.

Although Bush cannot fairly be said to have only now “discovered” Africa, this trip - from its itinerary to its rhetoric - shows that America is serious about reasserting its interest in the continent. In this regard, the international context could not be more important.

Over the past five years China’s top leaders have visited the continent five times, and the world’s emerging superpower has pretty much been the sole player in Africa. During that time, Beijing has been racking up gains on a continent neglected at an accelerating pace.

So much so, that in many countries where China has showered its largesse, Africans have spoken of the growing irrelevance of the World Bank, which has long been a leading source of financing, but whose lending, unlike China’s, comes with many strings attached.

In the United States and China, leaders have taken pains to insist that there is no competition between the two countries in Africa. Both countries, however, look to Africa as an important frontier, not just an important source of minerals and fuel, and as part of the world whose political weight will grow.

It should be said that having both countries engaged is good for the continent. Africans themselves sense this, and are determined never again to have to choose between outside partners, as they did during the last era of superpower rivalry.

Bush’s foreign policy has not built a reputation for subtlety, but the president’s tour sets up a compelling contrast between China and the United States, and achieves this in a way that shows that Beijing will face immense challenges to its ideologically hidebound foreign policy if Washington remains consistent and engaged.

As things stand, the United States, with its emphasis on good government, democracy and rights has positioned itself to be the friend of African peoples, while China positions itself as a friend of African governments. Where the Clinton administration often favored African strongmen, Bush’s visit tilts policy in favor of cleanliness and democracy. Because of its diplomatic competition with Taiwan, and its thirst for resources, China’s African embrace, meanwhile, is indiscriminate.

Make no mistake, by building roads, railways and universities, not to mention its industrial investments, China may potentially have a dramatic impact on people’s lives across the continent. The problem with its position, which is tied up with long-held notions of noninterference in internal affairs, is that China has little or nothing to say about corruption, about human rights abuses, or the lack of democracy that has been as important as any other factor in holding Africa back.

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Posted at 11:24 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Baltimore Sun
Feb. 16, 2008

At his arrival in Benin today – the first American president to set foot there – President Bush opened his six-day trip to Africa with a brief press conference at Cadjehoun International Airport in Cotonou and a reporter’s question: “Is this a stunt?’’

“Mr. President, during this first visit to Benin, this is a first for you, but cooperation between our two countries has been going on for 47 years, but yet it’s the first time that we host a president of your great country in our country,’’ the questioner noted. “So in history, this has been written, but given what has just occurred, is this a diplomatic coup or is it truly a change in the relationships between Benin and the United States? Is this a stunt?”

“I’m here to really confirm to the people of Benin and the people on the continent of Africa that the United States is committed to helping improve people’s lives,’’ Bush replied. “And I also have come to a country like Benin to remind our fellow citizens that it’s in our national interest to support the people of nations….

“Even though we may not have had relations with them in the past — particularly those nations in which the leadership and the government makes a firm commitment to the investment in its people, as well as fighting corruption, marketplace economies, and — I’m — my trip here is a way to remind future presidents and future Congresses that it is in the national interest and in the moral interests of the United States of America to help people,’’ Bush said with this, his second trip to Africa.

Bush will tour five nations to tout U.S. aid in, but leave the hottest spot at this juncture, Kenya, to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who plans to travel there on Monday.

The U.S. is spending big money in Africa, with a campaign against AIDS and malaria, but, Bush said: “I reject some of the old-style type of grants, which basically said, let’s feel better; we’ll just give some money out. We believe that rather than making ourselves feel better, that our money ought to make the people of a particular country feel better about their government.

“I would say that it’s been a change of relationship. But it’s been a change of relationship because the leader have changed attitude toward how government ought to relate to its people. And so, Mr. President,’’ he said to his counterpart, President Yayi, who had visited the White House in 2006, “I’m proud to be the first president to be in Benin, and I want to thank you for extending me that invitation.’’

Next question: “It’s obvious that Benin is a hopeful example of progress on the African continent. There are a number of other examples, unfortunately, of violence and strife in other places — most notably Kenya — and I’m wondering, Mr. President, how you go about deciding how best to spend your time here on the continent? It seems a bit of a contrast when there are some hopeful signs, but there obviously are a number of other examples where things are, frankly, in a very tough position right now.’’

Bush: “When you herald success… it helps others realize what is possible. And you’re right, there’s no question — Sudan is a very difficult situation, which we have labeled a genocide, and which we’re sanctioning some, rallying others to provide aid in the hopes that there will be a robust U.N. force in Darfur that will help relive the suffering. As I said in my speech the other day, that the United States will help facilitate the movement of the force. As I told (the United Nations’) Ban Ki-moon yesterday in the White House, we want to help you, but you must make sure we have a robust force ready to go.

“Secondly, Kenya is an issue, and — we’re going to be in the neighborhood in Kenya — in Kenya’s neighborhood. And that’s why I’m sending Secretary Rice there to help the Kofi Annan initiative — all aimed at having a clear message that there be no violence and that there ought to be a power-sharing agreement. You know, this is — but this is a large place with a lot of nations, and no question not everything is perfect.

“On the other hand, there’s a lot of great success stories, and the United States is pleased to be involved with those success stories. I want to remind you… that when I first became President, there was about 50,000 people receiving antiretroviral drugs to deal with HIV/AIDS on the continent of Africa. Today, there’s about 1,300,000 just from the PEPFAR initiative. In other words, there’s great progress being made. And there’s a lot more work to be done. One of the reasons I’ve come on this trip is to say, look at the successes we’ve had. “We”, by the way, is not American successes; these are joint successes. And look at the work that needs to be done.’’

“You know, the Malaria Initiative is an initiative that is very dear to my heart and Laura’s heart because we weep when we think about little babies needlessly dying — and now we’ve got a President who is committed to distributing a net to every child under five years old,’’ he said. “But there are still a lot of places that need work on malaria. And so the reason I go to countries in which we’ve got good relations, where the leaders are making good choices, is to send a clear signal to others that we want to help you, but you’ve got to have good leadership, you’ve got to make right choices, and you’ve got to set a strategy in place, in order to benefit your people.

“I’m excited to be here, I really am. You know, it’s my second trip as President, Laura’s fifth trip as First Lady. I hope that sends a clear commitment that the United States — a clear signal that the United States is committed. We’re committed for national security reasons, and that being that these ideologues that murder the innocent people can only attract people when there’s hopelessness; they have no clear vision that’s positive. But we’re also committed for moral reasons.

“As I told you,’’ Bush said, “and told people all the time, to whom much is given, much is required. Well, we’ve been given a lot in the United States, and I believe we’re required to help brothers and sisters in need.’’

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Posted at 12:03 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Shanghai Daily
2008-2-18

The subjects in Howard French’s pictures are familiar and distant. An old lady carries a bamboo basket for groceries down an endless, twisting longtang (lane); families set up simple tables and chairs on a narrow street for dinner; an old man sits back and surveys the world through tired eyes from a rickety old chair outside his weather-beaten house.

The old-styled brick houses and the longtang are signatures of Shanghai that are vanishing, replaced by modern, high-rise buildings. And the lifestyles revealed in the pictures, so familiar to many who grew up in Shanghai, are also getting lost amidst these modern buildings.

The structures and the scenes are becoming distant memories because they are disappearing, just as the title of French’s photo exhibition at m97 on Moganshan Road says, “Disappearing Shanghai.”

The fact all of the pictures are shot in black and white only serves to add to the sense of nostalgia, even though they were only taken in the past three years.

“I’m trying to portray a lifestyle that is in danger. When it is gone, it will be gone forever,” explains French, a journalists and photographer who came to Shanghai in 2003 as bureau chief for The New York Times.

French says he is strongly attracted to the lifestyle in such neighborhoods, a community and lifestyle very different from that found within the walls of high-rise buildings.

Always interested in people, French did not have a particular project in mind when he started taking pictures of scenes and people that interested him in Shanghai.

But the pictures evolved as a series, mostly portraits of local people in natural surroundings.

“These are human beings who have a lifestyle that strikes me as very rich. It’s not based on a theory that they’re different from other people or similar to other people. Their humanity impresses me,” says the newsman.

French started his work from Shaanxi Road, a street to the north of Suzhou Creek which still features a good many longtang and old houses. It is in streets like Shaanxi Road that many old Shanghainese customs remain. Many breakfast vendors still set up tables and chairs on the street where neighbors gather and chat in the morning before going to work or grocery shopping.

Some families move dinner tables outside, especially in summer, since their houses are small and hot without air conditioners.

And retired people sit on small chairs outside houses, read newspapers, observe the street, and just chat with each other to kill time.

These customs have always been taken for granted but are slowly being lost amidst Shanghai’s rapid development in recent years which has seen many people move into new, big buildings. And just like in other big cities, residents in big buildings often don’t know each other very well, not to mention share tables or meet for a daily chat in longtang.

“There’s a certain poetry to these neighborhoods. As they are more developed, the poetry will disappear. There’s a loss involved. In life, every loss has an element of sadness,” says French.

Prior to his Shanghai exhibition, French also exhibited the works in Berlin and St Louis in the United States and hopes to have many more showings.

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Posted at 9:36 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times
An excerpt:

In Japan, the trees are blue. So are the traffic lights, even though they look decidedly green to uninitiated outsiders. The Japanese do have a word for green, but when it comes to foliage and traffic signals, blue is the preferred term.

Blue trees are not the only initially puzzling thing about Japan. In a hundred tiny gestures and assumptions, Japan can seem just slightly out of kilter. When Japanese people refer to themselves, they point to their nose, not their heart. Many restaurants have no chairs. The Japanese count in units of ten thousand, making the population of Japan one-thousand-two-hundred-and-fifty ten thousands, not 125 million as you might have thought. The calendar is different, too. Circular not linear, time tracks each imperial reign – I am sending this dispatch, not from the year 2008, but from Heisei 20.

These are superficial differences to be sure, tiny variations of the sort found in many places a western-centric observer might consider “odd”. But even experienced Japanologists can find Japan a topsy-turvy place. Lafcadio Hearn, an Irish-Greek who pitched up in Japan in 1890, only a decade after the country opened to the west, wrote: “The outward strangeness of things in Japan produces a queer thrill impossible to describe – a feeling of weirdness which comes to us only with the perception of the totally unfamiliar.”

Hearn was no ingenue or racist. A naturalised Japanese citizen, he was known as Yakumo Koizumi (or, rather, Koizumi Yakumo, since the family name is stated first in Japanese). He married the daughter of a samurai, spoke Japanese and spent the last 15 years of his life in Japan. Yet foreshadowing a sentiment often expressed by today’s long-time residents, puzzled at their inability to grasp what they imagine to be the essence of Japan, he says: “Long ago the best and dearest Japanese friend I ever had said to me, a little before his death, ‘when you find, in four or five years more, that you cannot understand the Japanese at all, then you will begin to know something about them.’” Tellingly, his book was entitled Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation. A year after his attempt, he was dead.

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Posted at 2:27 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times
February 15 2008
An excerpt, and further evidence that the Weekend section of the FT is one of the best reads in journalism.

…Until recently, the mention of Mo Ibrahim outside the circles of telecoms buffs or African business aficionados tended to elicit the response: “Mo who?” Google him since he sold Celtel, his African mobile-phone company, for $3.4bn and he starts popping up in the company of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

This is perhaps more for the audacity – some say hubris – of his new, philanthropic mission than for the size of his fortune. Where Gates has decided to do battle with micro-organisms wreaking preventable havoc across Africa, Ibrahim is taking on a more visible, if equally pernicious, enemy of African development. After we have ordered our starters – on his advice I go for pasta, he opts for carpaccio and parmesan – Ibrahim turns to this latest project: persuading African leaders to rule more wisely, more fairly and for shorter periods.

A decade building mobile-phone networks across the continent has convinced him that business and trade, not charity and aid, will ultimately bring prosperity to Africa. But neither tactic can succeed without a radical shift in the way the continent is governed.

“The country is so lush, so green,” he says, recalling a flight over Kenya before the violently disputed outcome of December’s elections. “How come the people here could ever be hungry? Look at these spaces, huge, endless spaces, animals, water. I came to the conclusion that unless you are ruled properly, you cannot move forward. Everything else is second. Everything.”

African leaders, Ibrahim continues, look to retirement as they would to the edge of a cliff, beyond which lies a dizzying fall towards retribution and relative poverty…

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Posted at 2:15 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate
(This is a lot of fun, with an interesting kicker that you’ll have to follow through the link at the bottom.)

Barack Obama just seems to get cooler and cooler. He’s the most popular topic on the New York Times topics page, ahead of even the Westminster dog show. Internet widgets allow you to see what great thing Barack Obama has done for you (he mowed your lawn). At Slate we also had fun with the cult of Obama. And on the New York subway Friday morning, one of our copy editors, Ellen Tarlin, heard one woman joke to another: “Obama, will you pick me up after my noninvasive minor surgical procedure?” To which the other replied: “Obama, will you hold my hair back when I puke?” (The two went on to discuss the merits of J. Crew vs. Banana Republic. Seriously.) The parlor games go on. My commute is shorter since I started traveling with Barack Obama. This burrito has a real Obama to it. In this cold? Not without your Barack Obama.

Among a crowd of hip and stylish Democrats, announcing one’s skepticism about the cool kid would totally dampen the party. Nor is the dynamic just true for young people. John Lewis, the venerable civil rights hero and congressman, put words to this feeling recently. “In recent days, there is a sense of movement and a sense of spirit,” he said, suggesting that he might switch his superdelegate vote from Hillary Clinton to Obama. “Something is happening in America and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap.”

If you insist on being that party-killing skeptic, it either means you’re a Washington cynic, supporting the worst elements of Clinton’s campaign, or you’re cluelessly out of step with the sway of the culture. On Facebook, people write about dreams featuring Obama. There is only one correct reaction to the will.i.am “Yes We Can” video and that is to start chanting along. That’s why the Obama campaign sent it out to supporters. He is the sun, the moon, the Ambien and the Red Bull.

Big deal. People like him. That usually happens with the front-runners. They get more votes, and then they win. (Although with these maddening Democratic Party apportionment rules, I think winning also requires hopping on one foot.) But isn’t there a natural limit to our enthusiasm for to this kind of sweeping phenomenon? Isn’t the generation that Obama has so successfully courted usually the first to toss overhyped products, even the overhyped products with which they were at first so enthralled? More generally, shouldn’t Democrats who have complained that George Bush was elected on the strength of a popularity contest be nervous that this blossoming Obamadulation is getting out of hand?

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Posted at 10:54 AM · Comments (0)

2 New Solo Photography Exhibitions:
Robert van der Hilst “Shanghai: 1990-1993” and
Howard W. French “Disappearing Shanghai”
Exhibition Dates: February 16 - March 21, 2008

Opening Reception: Saturday February 16, 5 - 8 pm

m97 Gallery is pleased to announce two new photography exhibitions: “Shanghai: 1990-1993” by Dutch photographer Robert van der Hilst and “Disappearing Shanghai” by American photographer Howard French. Both photographers use their different camera languages to present us a grand picture of the people and streets of Shanghai beginning with Robert’s color Kodachrome works in the early 1990s to the recent past, and five years of Howard French’s black-and-white documentary work in the alleyways of Shanghai. The exhibitions begin on February 16, 2008, and m97 Gallery will hold an opening reception for the artists on Saturday February 16th from 5pm to 8pm.

Robert van der Hilst’s early color work from “Shanghai: 1990-1993” captures the early roots of this large metropolis as it readies itself for the great thrust forward towards modernization. Bringing a strong sense of color and composition to his work in the streets of Shanghai, Robert’s color Kodachrome photographs, now viewed some 18 years later, bring a sense of historical reflection after the past two decades of breakneck development in China’s financial capital. His subjects and sceneries are at once both familiar and foreign to the viewer. The subtleties and textures of Robert’s works, as well as the overall appearance of the city and its people are captured by the Dutch photographer as he first encounters a city poised on the edge of a newfound greatness. First traveling to Shanghai in 1990 on assignment for Vogue Magazine to feature a reportage of the city, Robert became fascinated by his first encounter with China and later made a total of seven trips to Shanghai in the course of three years.

American photographer Howard French’s “Disappearing Shanghai” series, is an intimate journey through many of the forgotten lanes or Nong Tangs of Shanghai. Documenting the bustling back alleyways of the now highly-developed metropolis of Shanghai, Howard’s black-and-white photographs offer a contemplation and reflection on the fading architecture of the old lanes and the people living in the shadow of Shanghai’s modernization. As the Shanghai bureau chief for the New York Times, Howard has managed to capture intimate scenes of normal people and their lives in the old lanes of Shanghai whose days are clearly numbered. As quoted in the New York Times, Howard says “ Over and over again, I have been asked by the people of these neighborhoods what is my purpose in taking pictures of these lives? Am I trying to show a bad side of China? To make fun of poor people? I have no trouble answering, and my reply is effective more often than not because it is sincere. ‘I take pictures in your neighborhood because there is something very beautiful about the lifestyle you have,’ I say. ‘Things may not be perfect, but there is a very special kind of community you have, and soon places like this will all be gone.’”

Robert van der Hilst lives in Shanghai and Paris, and is currently working on a large-scale photography project titled “Chinese Interiors”. He has worked as a photographer in Europe, South Africa and North America and his monograph “The Cubans” was published in 2001.

Howard W. French is a senior journalist for the New York Times and has been Shanghai Bureau Chief for the Times since 2003. He has won “ the Publisher’s Award” seven times and currently lives in Shanghai where he is also at work on his first novel.

For additional photographs, interviews or other media queries, please contact m97 Gallery at: info@m97gallery.com or by phone: (+8621) 6266.1597. Tuesday-Sunday 10:30-18:30.

m97 画廊 ｜ 上海
摄影双个展 ：
罗伯特·凡德·休斯特 《上海：1990－1993》 与
傅好文 《 消失的上海 》
展出日期：2008年 2月16日 – 3月21日

开幕仪式：2月16日 星期六 下午5点 – 8点

m97画廊荣幸地宣布摄影双个展：荷兰摄影师罗伯特·凡德·休斯特《上海：1990－1993》与美国摄影师及记者傅好文《 消失的上海 》即将开幕。罗伯特九十年代初拍摄的柯达彩色照片和傅好文最近五年的黑白纪实照片从不同角度为我们呈现出了上海在这两个时代的不同风情。本次展览将于2008年2月16日开始，开幕仪式定于2月16日星期六下午5点至8点，届时艺术家会莅临现场。

罗伯特·凡德·休斯特的早期彩色摄影作品《上海：1990－1993》展现了一个当时正摩拳擦掌准备朝着现代化大都市进程飞跃的上海。他的色彩和构图强烈的彩色照片让观众有机会在经过了十八年飞速发展后的今天欣赏到这座中国财经中心当年的历史样貌。荷兰摄影师与当时处于转型时期的上海的碰撞造就了这组细节与质地丰富，并且充分反映了当时的城市和人的生活形态的照片。那些曾几何时的人与风景立刻带给观众一种既熟悉且陌生的感觉。1990年罗伯特被巴黎《时尚》杂志派到上海来拍一组照片。那次旅程让他立刻迷上了中国。之后的三年里他曾七次返回拍摄。

美国摄影师傅好文的《 消失的上海 》系列是一段在被遗忘的弄堂中游走徘徊的私人旅程。他拍摄都市中的背角街道，深切关注着现代化进程阴影下的老街和生活于其中的人。身为《纽约时报》上海分社社长的傅好文捕捉了平凡人与时日无多的老房子之间的亲密关系。 正如他在《纽约时报》中曾写到：“街坊里的人们曾多次问我，我拍摄他们的生活场景，目的是什么？是不是要显示中国的阴暗面？或嘲笑穷人？回答并不难，因为我的答复是真诚的，所以常常为人所接受。‘我在你们的街头拍照，是因为你们生活方式中一些美好的东西。’我说，‘任何事物也许都不十全十美，但这是一个极其特殊的地方，不用多久，这一切恐怕都会消失了。’”

罗伯特·凡德·休斯特生活在上海和巴黎。目前正在拍摄大型摄影作品“中国人家”系列。他曾在欧洲，南非，美洲等地从事摄影工作。1991年出版摄影图书“The Cubans”。

傅好文为《纽约时报》高级记者。自从2003年以来担任该报驻上海分社社长。曾七次荣获报业人士最高荣誉奖项“the Publisher’s Award”, 住于中国上海。目前正在上海创作一组人体艺术照片以及第一部小说。

如果您需要更多相关摄影作品，约见或者其他媒体需要，请联系m97画廊，请电邮至：info@m97gallery.com 或者电话至（＋8621）6266.1597. 开放时间：每天 上午10:30 - 下午 18:30

Posted at 8:07 PM · Comments (1)

Copyright The New York Times

If you have seen any of Jacob Riis’s photographs, you have probably never forgotten them. Riis was the Danish-born police reporter who in the late 1880s brought magnesium-flash photography into some of the darkest and most troubled spots in New York City — the tenements near Mulberry Bend, where Columbus Park now stands. New immigrants were crushed together there in some of the worst squalor and highest population densities ever recorded on this planet.

By Riis’s time, social and political reform efforts had been going on for half a century, but to little effect. What made the difference was his photographs, which Riis used in popular lectures and in his best-selling book, “How the Other Half Lives,” published in 1890, five years before the Mulberry Bend tenements were finally torn down.

His photographs showed a hidden city, a morgue of the living. He allowed New Yorkers to witness, as if firsthand, the overcrowding he caught in the cellars and flophouses, the tenement rooms where sleeping bodies were stacked on top of each other, the dingy corners that had been turned into sweatshops.

His pictures are a harsh, unofficial census, a record of impossible conditions in immigrant New York. On each face he photographed, there is a look of personal extinction except, that is, on the faces of children, who somehow manage to look only hardened.

Posted at 12:21 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Age

Washington
February 14, 2008

MAO Zedong proposed sending 10 million Chinese women to the United States, in talks with top envoy Henry Kissinger in 1973, according to documents released by the US State Department.

The Chinese dictator said he believed such emigration could kick-start bilateral trade but could also “harm” the US with a population explosion similar to China’s, according to documents covering US-China ties between 1973 and 1976.

In a long conversation that stretched past midnight at Mao’s residence on February 17, 1973, a cigar-smoking Mao referred to the dismal trade between the two countries, saying China was a “very poor country” and “what we have in excess is women”.

He first suggested sending “thousands” of women but as an afterthought proposed “10 million”, drawing laughter at the meeting, also attended by Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai.

Dr Kissinger, who was president Richard Nixon’s national security adviser at that time, told Mao that the US had no quotas or tariffs for Chinese women, drawing more laughter.

He then tried to highlight the threat posed by the Soviet Union and other global concerns as he moved to lay the groundwork for restoring diplomatic ties a year after Nixon’s historic visit to China.

But Mao dragged the talks back to Chinese women.

“Let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way you can lessen our burdens,” Mao said.

“Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you 10 million.”

Dr Kissinger noted that Mao was “improving his offer”.

Mao continued: “By doing so we can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interests. In our country we have too many women, and they have a way of doing things.

“They give birth to children and our children are too many.”

Dr Kissinger replied: “It is such a novel proposition, we will have to study it.”

The leaders then spoke briefly about the threat posed by the Soviet Union, with Mao saying he hoped Moscow would attack China and be defeated.

But Mao said: “We have so many women in our country that don’t know how to fight.”

The assistant Chinese foreign minister, Wang Haijung, then cautioned Mao that if the minutes of the conversation were made public “it would incur the public wrath”.

Dr Kissinger agreed with Mao that the minutes be scrapped.

But when Dr Kissinger joked he would raise the issue at his next press conference, Mao said he was “not afraid of anything”.

“Anyway, God has sent me an invitation,” said the Chinese leader, who coughed badly during the talks.

Mao died in September 1976. US-China diplomatic relations were restored in 1979.

AFP

Posted at 10:51 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post
Sunday, February 10, 2008; B02

PARIS

If I have to get old, I want to do it in Paris.

It’s not because of the dank weather, the constant personal snubs or a fetish for unpasteurized cheese. It’s because, quite frankly, I’d like to keep having sex.

In the United States, my odds would be grim. Through our 40s, we American women manage to arrange romps on a fairly regular basis. But the latest national statistics show that by our 50s, a third of us haven’t had sex in the last year. By our 60s, nearly half have gone sexless in the previous year. Once we hit our 70s, most of us might as well hang up an “out of business” sign. (Needless to say, men fare much better.)

So much for the gym-bodied baby boomers who promised to make 60 the new 40, using Botox as an aphrodisiac. Among today’s 50-plus women, the problem of sexlessness is as bad or worse than it was for older women two decades ago.

But not in France. Frenchwomen simply don’t suffer from the same dramatic, post-40s slide into sexual obsolescence. Just 15 percent of Frenchwomen in their 50s and 27 percent in their 60s haven’t had any sex in the past year, according to a 2004 national survey by France’s Regional Health Observatory. Another national survey being released next month will report that cohabiting Frenchwomen over 50 are having more sex now than they did in the early 1990s.

Try not to hate them: Frenchwomen don’t get fat, and they do get lucky.

The idea that older women are desirable goes right to the top. Before Nicolas Sarkozy hooked up with his new bride, 40-year-old Carla Bruni, a French magazine suggested some matches for the newly divorced president, including 50-ish TV presenters, writers and an extremely buff sailing champion. After all, Sarkozy, 53, had just been dumped by his then 49-year-old wife Cecilia, who had famously obsessed him and who had had no trouble finding other suitors.

This post-menopausal sexiness is palpable here. In the lingerie section of an upscale department store, I recently watched a gray-haired man earnestly inspecting the black lace bra and panties that his similarly aged companion had just picked out. “That’s just what’s needed,” he clucked, handing his credit card to the clerk.

So why are older American women sitting around feeling bad about their necks, while their sisters across the ocean — craggy necks or not — are off being seduced?

For starters, Frenchwomen d’un certain âge have much better role models. Sure, Hollywood still employs a handful of preternaturally preserved actresses in their 50s and above. But even these women, such as Susan Sarandon, tend to be famous precisely because they’ve defied the laws of aging. And they’re mostly denied unfiltered close-ups and romantic leads.

French cinema, however, is in the throes of a revival for 50-ish actresses, many of whom got their starts as fresh-faced teenagers in the early 1970s. These women aren’t all airbrushed versions of their former selves, nor does the interest in them seem to be mostly nostalgic. “They have roles not as old women but as women. Which means they’re still considered to be desirable,” says Danièle Laufer, author of the book “50 Ans? Vous Ne Les Faites Pas” (“50 Years Old? You Don’t Look It”). “Fifteen or 20 years ago, you wouldn’t have seen this. I think they refuse to give up power.”

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Posted at 9:14 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

An excerpt:

…In recent years, the pages of this and other publications — as well as the airwaves jammed with gastronomic programs — have been filled with discussions purporting to be about Chinese cookery. Too often these discussions have been rife with error. Chinese dishes are misidentified and misunderstood. Food is routinely declared Chinese simply because it is marinated in soy sauce; cookbooks tout misguided concepts like the “flavor principle,” encouraging home chefs to “re-create” Chinese dishes simply by studding them with bottled and packaged products.

After reading and rereading such nonsense, I have resolved this New Year to stop stewing and to begin questioning how and why Chinese food is so horribly misunderstood.

Let’s start at the beginning. Virtually all of today’s so-called Chinese cooking in the United States can best be described as undistinguished, served in restaurants generally indistinguishable one from another…

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Posted at 2:59 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The National Journal
An excerpt:

…No previous Democratic presidential candidate has joined well-off whites to African-Americans as Obama is doing: It is as if he is melding the constituencies of Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson from 1984. Clinton’s lunch-bucket coalition of core Democrats motivated by material needs is more familiar — Walter Mondale, who ran against Hart and Jackson in 1984, would surely recognize it — but she adds to that familiar picture a new gender twist and a dominant position among Latinos.

Adding to the complexity, both contenders are demonstrating the rare ability to reshape the electorate. Obama is increasing the share of the vote cast by young people and the affluent, and women are turning out in huge numbers for Clinton. (So did Latinos in California.) “The bottom line is, these coalitions are of similar size, which is why the race is so close,” says veteran Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.

Before Tuesday, the emerging conventional wisdom was that a war of attrition would benefit Obama. That might be right. Obama’s huge donor base should allow him to outspend Clinton, who has already been forced to lend her campaign money.

Since the voting began, he has also attracted far more high-profile endorsements than Clinton — from centrist red-staters such as Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to liberal lions like Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. And even the Clinton campaign acknowledges that Obama is the favorite in most remaining February contests — particularly Tuesday’s primaries in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., which combine African-Americans with high-income whites.

March 4 looms as the critical date for Clinton. That’s when Texas and Ohio vote, and both are the sort of brawny blue-collar states that favor her. If Obama generates enough momentum in February to swipe either, it could trigger a rush toward him from party leaders eager to end the race (especially because John McCain seems likely to claim the GOP nomination by then). But if Clinton holds both, she could consolidate an advantage over Obama in the other beefy states that follow: Pennsylvania in April, and then Indiana and Kentucky — which don’t vote until May and may find their decisions more relevant than they, or anyone else, had expected….

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Posted at 2:38 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright City Magazine

About half of American males aged 18 to 34 play video games—and do so for over two hours a day.

It’s 1965 and you’re a 26-year-old white guy. You have a factory job, or maybe you work for an insurance broker. Either way, you’re married, probably have been for a few years now; you met your wife in high school, where she was in your sister’s class. You’ve already got one kid, with another on the way. For now, you’re renting an apartment in your parents’ two-family house, but you’re saving up for a three-bedroom ranch house in the next town. Yup, you’re an adult!

Now meet the twenty-first-century you, also 26. You’ve finished college and work in a cubicle in a large Chicago financial-services firm. You live in an apartment with a few single guy friends. In your spare time, you play basketball with your buddies, download the latest indie songs from iTunes, have some fun with the Xbox 360, take a leisurely shower, massage some product into your hair and face—and then it’s off to bars and parties, where you meet, and often bed, girls of widely varied hues and sizes. They come from everywhere: California, Tokyo, Alaska, Australia. Wife? Kids? House? Are you kidding?

Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood’s milestones—high school degree, financial independence, marriage, and children. These days, he lingers—happily—in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. Decades in unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but in fact it is to the early twenty-first century what adolescence was to the early twentieth: a momentous sociological development of profound economic and cultural import. Some call this new period “emerging adulthood,” others “extended adolescence”; David Brooks recently took a stab with the “Odyssey Years,” a “decade of wandering.”

But while we grapple with the name, it’s time to state what is now obvious to legions of frustrated young women: the limbo doesn’t bring out the best in young men. With women, you could argue that adulthood is in fact emergent. Single women in their twenties and early thirties are joining an international New Girl Order, hyperachieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling, and dining with friends [see “The New Girl Order,” Autumn 2007]. Single Young Males, or SYMs, by contrast, often seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3, and, in many cases, underachieving. With them, adulthood looks as though it’s receding.

Freud famously asked: “What do women want?” Notice that he didn’t ask what men wanted—perhaps he thought that he’d figured that one out. But that’s a question that ad people, media execs, and cultural entrepreneurs have pondered a lot in recent years. They’re particularly interested in single young men, for two reasons: there are a lot more of them than before; and they tend to have some extra change. Consider: in 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old and 85 percent of 30-year-old white men were married; in 2000, only 33 percent and 58 percent were, respectively. And the percentage of young guys tying the knot is declining as you read this. Census Bureau data show that the median age of marriage among men rose from 26.8 in 2000 to 27.5 in 2006—a dramatic demographic shift for such a short time period.

That adds up to tens of millions more young men blissfully free of mortgages, wives, and child-care bills. Historically, marketers have found this group an “elusive audience”—the phrase is permanently affixed to “men between 18 and 34” in adspeak—largely immune to the pleasures of magazines and television, as well as to shopping expeditions for the products advertised there. But by the mid-1990s, as SYM ranks swelled, marketers began to get their number. One signal moment came in April 1997, when Maxim, a popular British “lad magazine,” hit American shores. Maxim strove to be the anti-Playboy-and-Esquire; bad-boy owner Felix Dennis sniffed at celebrity publishers with their tired formulas. Instead, he later observed, the magazine’s creators adopted the “astonishing methodology of asking our readers what they wanted … and then supplying it.”

And what did those readers—male, unmarried, median age 26, median household income $60,000 or so—want? As the philosophers would say, duh. Maxim plastered covers and features with pouty-lipped, tousled-haired pinups in lacy underwear and, in case that didn’t do the trick, block-lettered promises of sex! lust! naughty! And it worked. More than any men’s magazine before or since, Maxim grabbed that elusive 18- to 34-year-old single-college-educated-guy market, and soon boasted about 2.5 million readers—more than GQ, Esquire, and Men’s Journal combined.

Victoria’s Secret cover art doesn’t fully explain the SYM’s attraction to Maxim. After all, plenty of down-market venues had the sort of bodacious covers bound to trigger the young male’s reptilian brain. No, what set Maxim apart from other men’s mags was its voice. It was the sound of guys hanging around the Animal House living room—where put-downs are high-fived; gadgets are cool; rock stars, sports heroes, and cyborg battles are awesome; jobs and Joni Mitchell suck; and babes are simply hot—or not. “Are there any cool jobs related to beer?” a reader’s letter asks in a recent issue. Answer: brand manager, beer tester, and brewmaster.

Maxim asked the SYM what he wanted and learned that he didn’t want to grow up. Whatever else you might say about Playboy or Esquire, they tried to project the image of a cultured and au courant fellow; as Hefner famously—and from today’s cultural vantage point, risibly—wrote in an early Playboy, his ideal reader enjoyed “inviting a female acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” Hearing this, the Maxim dude would want to hurl. He’d like to forget that he ever went to school.

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Letter from China
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
February 7, 2008
SHANGHAI: For months, as the Beijing Olympics draw nearer, China has been refining its arguments in favor of disassociating the Games from politics.

This effort reached something of a rhetorical crescendo last week with an editorial in The People’s Daily. “Those who want to use the Olympics to discredit China, and those who think the Olympics will promote China to change in the way they hope, are doomed to be disappointed,” the column said. “Their efforts will be futile.”

In addressing its domestic audience, the Chinese government makes little effort to clarify what sort of changes the forces, which it vows to defy, are seeking. Instead, the predictable thrust of the propaganda campaign is to equate the Olympics with the pride and “face” of the Chinese people and to cast anyone who criticizes the country and its playing host to the Games as sinister enemy forces.

It is worth pausing to make clear what the criticism has been all about. Hitherto, most of the voices that have spoken of a boycott have objected to Chinese support for the government of Sudan, which has conducted a genocide-like campaign in its oil-rich western province, Darfur.

Before speaking further of Darfur or even of China, it should be noted that to some extent the Olympics have always been about politics. China, as many others before it, seeks to use the games to give a boost to its global “brand.” It’s an old story, and one that has been tried by all kinds of countries, from Nazi Germany to a rebuilt Japan.

China’s aims are clearly neither as sinister as the Nazis’ nor as mundane as Japan’s. In a word, the country seeks to announce its arrival in the first rank of nations, as a place of peace and prosperity and infrastructure - and there’s the rub.

China has made impressive strides, acquiring lots of shiny new hardware and many other trappings of a great modern power. But its see-no-evil attitude toward the problems of its Sudanese client raises troubling questions that differentiate Beijing from other recent hosts of the Olympics.

If China’s lack of attachment to human rights were simply a matter of averting one’s glance from genocide in Sudan, it would be a serious enough reason for concern. The country’s attitude toward human rights and democracy, however, has far broader implications.

Fighting has raged this week in Sudan’s western neighbor, Chad, where China has growing oil and commercial interests. Sudan is widely believed to have backed rebels who sought to overthrow President Idriss Déby of Chad. With two clients involved, one might have expected China to play a leading role in restoring peace in the region.

Instead, Beijing has stood back from the fray, allowing France to rescue its nationals in Chad and expending little discernible political capital chastising Sudan for the rebel invasion or nudging the parties toward a political settlement.

When things get messy, the attitude here is that such trouble spots are very far away and that China doesn’t like to interfere. The Chinese public, meanwhile, is assiduously kept in the dark about the nature or extent of China’s fast-growing overseas interests.

I was reminded of this as I looked for news stories on China and Chad on the Internet. My browser went blank, meaning the censors had decided this was not knowledge I should be able to find.

Sudan appears to have given backing to the rebels because Chad was preparing to play host to a European force that would have provided humanitarian relief and, inevitably, intelligence about the state of things in neighboring Darfur.

Khartoum clearly doesn’t want this, but where does Beijing stand? To be charitable, it is hard to say.

Chad itself is a mess today, not because it lacks growth, which Beijing sees as a cure for every ill, but because it lacks social justice and any democratic way of sharing the spoils of its booming oil income.

This leads to incessant warlordism, not development, with the coup d’état institutionalized as the only way of changing leaders.

As China emerges as a leading player in the resource-rich Third World, one awaits its constructive thinking on places like Chad and Sudan. Instead, one mostly hears silence.

Why is it so hard for China to move beyond the idea that economic growth and noninterference are the be-all and end-all of foreign policy? That is because they are also the last word in its domestic policy. The lack of democratic content in China’s foreign policy is closely linked to the lack of democracy in domestic politics.

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Copyright The New Yorker

February 4, 2008

In 610 A.D., Muhammad ibn Abdallah, a forty-year-old man from a prosperous merchant family in Mecca, repaired to a cave on nearby Mt. Hira to meditate—a retreat he had made many times. That year, though, his experience was different. An angel appeared and seized him, speaking to him the words of God. Muhammad fell to his knees and crawled home to his wife. “Wrap me up!” he cried. He feared for his sanity. But, as the voice revisited him, he came to believe that it truly issued from God. It called on him to reform his society. Poor people were to be given charity; slaves were to be treated justly; usury was to be outlawed. Muhammad’s tribesmen, the Quraysh, were polytheists, like most people in the Arabian Peninsula at that time, but this God, Allah, proclaimed that he was the only God. He was the same deity that the Jews and the Christians worshipped. Jesus Christ wasn’t his son, though. Christ was just a prophet, like the prophets of the Old Testament. Their word was now superseded by Muhammad’s, as their creeds were supplanted by this new one, Islam.

When Muhammad started preaching in Mecca, people saw him as a harmless crank, but as he gained followers he began to be regarded as a menace. Mecca was an important trading hub, with rich merchants. Muhammad’s God forbade all ostentation. Furthermore, if, as he instructed, the pagan idols were to be discarded, that would mean no more revenue from their shrines. In 622, Muhammad and his followers were driven out of Mecca. They fled to Yathrib, which became known as Medina, and from there they warred with their native city. In the beginning, Muhammad’s treatment of his fellow-monotheists the Jews and the Christians was conciliatory, but new religions do not normally establish themselves with the help of older religions. The local Jewish tribes conspired against him. After a decisive battle in 627, Muhammad had seven hundred Jews beheaded in Medina’s central market. In 630, he and his men took Mecca. Muhammad ordered the destruction of the three hundred and sixty idols around the city’s great temple, the Kabah. He proclaimed the supremacy of Islam, and reportedly sent messengers to the rulers of Persia, Byzantium, Yemen, and Ethiopia bidding them to convert. According to his biographer Karen Armstrong, he spent his few remaining years trying to establish peace, sometimes over the objections of his lieutenants.

Soon after Muhammad’s death, in 632, the record of what God had said to him was collected in the Koran, and his contemporaries’ testimonies about his life were gathered in the Hadith. At the same time, Islam expanded, with a speed unique in history. One of the obligations imposed on the faithful by the Koran was jihad, or struggle. This has been translated as “holy war,” and there are passages in the Koran to support such a reading, notably the recommendation that Muslims kill enemies of the faith: “Fight against them until idolatry is no more and Allah’s religion reigns supreme.” But just a few paragraphs later the Koran makes the opposite decree: “There shall be no compulsion in religion.” Some interpreters of the Koran—particularly in recent years, when holy war has become a matter of public alarm—have argued that “jihad” actually means spiritual combat, every Muslim’s fight within himself against the temptations of evil. I don’t know why a book that was collected, rather than composed, should have to be internally consistent, or why a religious document that originated within a nomadic society in the seventh century and includes such things as the moon splitting in two should be asked to conform to post-Enlightenment thought. The Bible also contradicts itself, and has water turning into wine. Such matters are a problem only for literalists. As for slaying one’s enemies, this is enthusiastically recommended in Psalms (“Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones”), as it is in many premodern writings.

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Copyright The New York Post

… Every election is, at some level, a simple conversation between the two camps. Obama began the campaign by saying he was new; Hillary replied that he was inexperienced. Obama answered that he was a voice for change - and that was the state of discussion leading up to Iowa.

Then, after losing Iowa and almost failing in New Hampshire, the Clintons basically panicked and played the race card - injecting it into a contest that had been colorblind.

While Hillary emphasizes in every speech that she could be the first woman president, Obama had rarely mentioned race. He ran for the Democratic nomination like a Republican black - never summoning victim status and avoiding racial remarks entirely.

Had the Clintons shut up and let the black voters of South Carolina do their talking for them, the block African-American vote there for Obama would’ve brought the race issue home to undecided white voters, triggering a pro-Hillary backlash. But they couldn’t keep quiet. Their oh-so-subtle racial innuendo (for which I doubt they thought they would get caught), philosophizing about the relative roles Martin Luther King and President Lyndon Johnson in achieving civil rights, landed them in the hot water.

With nothing else new to say, Hillary, in effect, countered Obama’s message of change by saying “You’re black.” When Bill compared Obama to Jesse Jackson, the point was obvious…

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Copyright The Chronicle of Higher Education

Fifty years after he published Things Fall Apart, his first novel, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe recalls having modest hopes for the book. At the time, he was a young university graduate who had found a job at the Nigerian Broadcasting Company, in Lagos. “I was alone in my room, scribbling away, and if nobody had paid any attention at all to me, I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised,” Achebe recalls with a quiet chuckle, here in his home on the campus of Bard College.

Yet the towering achievement of Things Fall Apart has been to become arguably the most influential work of fiction by an African writer. Since William Heinemann Ltd. first issued it in London, the novel has sold about 11 million copies in some 50 countries and as many languages. (This month Anchor Books will issue a 50th-aniversary edition.) In the United States, in an era of multiculturalism, it has become a fixture on college and high-school reading lists — for Americans, the quintessential novel about Africa. The influential critic Harold Bloom included it in 1994 in his selection of the canonical works of world literature, along with two of Achebe’s later novels dealing with Nigeria’s transition through colonization to troubled independent nationhood, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God…

…In a 1975 lecture, and then in an essay, Achebe took Conrad to task for emerging in his seminal short novel, Heart of Darkness, as a “thoroughgoing racist” even as he denounced imperialism. Achebe pointed out that Conrad had deprived his African characters of any voice, granting them only eight caricaturing words in the whole short novel. Pointing, still today, to those meager eight words, he says: “That’s all that Africa has, of language; the rest is screaming, shrieking, howling — animal sounds, you see.”

His criticism of Conrad drew vigorous protest from the author’s defenders. But Achebe says his intention was simple: to ask “why does one go to Africa for this kind of exoticism that demeans people, makes them less than their worth?”

Things Fall Apart does not idealize Nigerians; far from it. In Okonkwo, for example, Achebe depicts courage and nobility but also ignorance and cruelty. The mighty Okonkwo beats his wives and kills a child. Fellow villagers leave twin infants in the bush to die because twins are considered evil, and mutilate the bodies of dead children so that their ogbanje, or spirits, do not return to torment their mothers again.

“There are some very hard things going on there,” says Achebe. “I knew that I had to be truthful. I don’t know why, because it’s just as easy to make the thing up a little. But I refused. I went out of my way to pick up, to find out, to learn as much of the bad things that were going on, and bring them in, deliberately.” His characters, he says, “have a dark side, if you like. But I dare you to say they are not human, in spite of that.”

Just as some African critics originally chided Achebe for writing in English, the language of the colonizer, some feminists also objected that female characters were not fully realized in Things Fall Apart. Achebe’s supporters responded that such criticism fell into the undergraduate trap of criticizing a work for what it was not, rather than viewing it for what it was. Achebe’s female characters, his defenders said, were crucial to the plot, and anything but stereotypes.

In later novels, Achebe would point to greater respect for women, and attention to the knowledge they had, as one possible way ahead for Nigerian society. He also inspected the toll of corruption in the new nation-state, and imagined alternative forms of social and governmental organization — multi-ethnic, -linguistic, and -religious, led by enlightened intellectuals — that drew from indigenous customs.

But even there, Achebe was hardly wishful. In his third novel, Arrow of God (1964), for instance, he portrayed a traditional village priest who seeks an accommodation with British administrators provided they do not compromise his standing with his people or with his gods. “I wanted to see what would happen if this story of the coming of the white man were told again, and you had a different person confronting them,” says Achebe. “Unfortunately, what I discovered was that it didn’t matter. He also came to a sticky end. In other words, what has come to the Igbo people is bigger than they can deal with.”

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Copyright The Chronicle of Higher Education

Fifty years after he published Things Fall Apart, his first novel, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe recalls having modest hopes for the book. At the time, he was a young university graduate who had found a job at the Nigerian Broadcasting Company, in Lagos. “I was alone in my room, scribbling away, and if nobody had paid any attention at all to me, I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised,” Achebe recalls with a quiet chuckle, here in his home on the campus of Bard College.

Yet the towering achievement of Things Fall Apart has been to become arguably the most influential work of fiction by an African writer. Since William Heinemann Ltd. first issued it in London, the novel has sold about 11 million copies in some 50 countries and as many languages. (This month Anchor Books will issue a 50th-aniversary edition.) In the United States, in an era of multiculturalism, it has become a fixture on college and high-school reading lists — for Americans, the quintessential novel about Africa. The influential critic Harold Bloom included it in 1994 in his selection of the canonical works of world literature, along with two of Achebe’s later novels dealing with Nigeria’s transition through colonization to troubled independent nationhood, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God…

…In a 1975 lecture, and then in an essay, Achebe took Conrad to task for emerging in his seminal short novel, Heart of Darkness, as a “thoroughgoing racist” even as he denounced imperialism. Achebe pointed out that Conrad had deprived his African characters of any voice, granting them only eight caricaturing words in the whole short novel. Pointing, still today, to those meager eight words, he says: “That’s all that Africa has, of language; the rest is screaming, shrieking, howling — animal sounds, you see.”

His criticism of Conrad drew vigorous protest from the author’s defenders. But Achebe says his intention was simple: to ask “why does one go to Africa for this kind of exoticism that demeans people, makes them less than their worth?”

Things Fall Apart does not idealize Nigerians; far from it. In Okonkwo, for example, Achebe depicts courage and nobility but also ignorance and cruelty. The mighty Okonkwo beats his wives and kills a child. Fellow villagers leave twin infants in the bush to die because twins are considered evil, and mutilate the bodies of dead children so that their ogbanje, or spirits, do not return to torment their mothers again.

“There are some very hard things going on there,” says Achebe. “I knew that I had to be truthful. I don’t know why, because it’s just as easy to make the thing up a little. But I refused. I went out of my way to pick up, to find out, to learn as much of the bad things that were going on, and bring them in, deliberately.” His characters, he says, “have a dark side, if you like. But I dare you to say they are not human, in spite of that.”

Just as some African critics originally chided Achebe for writing in English, the language of the colonizer, some feminists also objected that female characters were not fully realized in Things Fall Apart. Achebe’s supporters responded that such criticism fell into the undergraduate trap of criticizing a work for what it was not, rather than viewing it for what it was. Achebe’s female characters, his defenders said, were crucial to the plot, and anything but stereotypes.

In later novels, Achebe would point to greater respect for women, and attention to the knowledge they had, as one possible way ahead for Nigerian society. He also inspected the toll of corruption in the new nation-state, and imagined alternative forms of social and governmental organization — multi-ethnic, -linguistic, and -religious, led by enlightened intellectuals — that drew from indigenous customs.

But even there, Achebe was hardly wishful. In his third novel, Arrow of God (1964), for instance, he portrayed a traditional village priest who seeks an accommodation with British administrators provided they do not compromise his standing with his people or with his gods. “I wanted to see what would happen if this story of the coming of the white man were told again, and you had a different person confronting them,” says Achebe. “Unfortunately, what I discovered was that it didn’t matter. He also came to a sticky end. In other words, what has come to the Igbo people is bigger than they can deal with.”

Click to read the complete article

Posted at 5:39 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Chronicle of Higher Education

Fifty years after he published Things Fall Apart, his first novel, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe recalls having modest hopes for the book. At the time, he was a young university graduate who had found a job at the Nigerian Broadcasting Company, in Lagos. “I was alone in my room, scribbling away, and if nobody had paid any attention at all to me, I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised,” Achebe recalls with a quiet chuckle, here in his home on the campus of Bard College.

Yet the towering achievement of Things Fall Apart has been to become arguably the most influential work of fiction by an African writer. Since William Heinemann Ltd. first issued it in London, the novel has sold about 11 million copies in some 50 countries and as many languages. (This month Anchor Books will issue a 50th-aniversary edition.) In the United States, in an era of multiculturalism, it has become a fixture on college and high-school reading lists — for Americans, the quintessential novel about Africa. The influential critic Harold Bloom included it in 1994 in his selection of the canonical works of world literature, along with two of Achebe’s later novels dealing with Nigeria’s transition through colonization to troubled independent nationhood, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God…

…In a 1975 lecture, and then in an essay, Achebe took Conrad to task for emerging in his seminal short novel, Heart of Darkness, as a “thoroughgoing racist” even as he denounced imperialism. Achebe pointed out that Conrad had deprived his African characters of any voice, granting them only eight caricaturing words in the whole short novel. Pointing, still today, to those meager eight words, he says: “That’s all that Africa has, of language; the rest is screaming, shrieking, howling — animal sounds, you see.”

His criticism of Conrad drew vigorous protest from the author’s defenders. But Achebe says his intention was simple: to ask “why does one go to Africa for this kind of exoticism that demeans people, makes them less than their worth?”

Things Fall Apart does not idealize Nigerians; far from it. In Okonkwo, for example, Achebe depicts courage and nobility but also ignorance and cruelty. The mighty Okonkwo beats his wives and kills a child. Fellow villagers leave twin infants in the bush to die because twins are considered evil, and mutilate the bodies of dead children so that their ogbanje, or spirits, do not return to torment their mothers again.

“There are some very hard things going on there,” says Achebe. “I knew that I had to be truthful. I don’t know why, because it’s just as easy to make the thing up a little. But I refused. I went out of my way to pick up, to find out, to learn as much of the bad things that were going on, and bring them in, deliberately.” His characters, he says, “have a dark side, if you like. But I dare you to say they are not human, in spite of that.”

Just as some African critics originally chided Achebe for writing in English, the language of the colonizer, some feminists also objected that female characters were not fully realized in Things Fall Apart. Achebe’s supporters responded that such criticism fell into the undergraduate trap of criticizing a work for what it was not, rather than viewing it for what it was. Achebe’s female characters, his defenders said, were crucial to the plot, and anything but stereotypes.

In later novels, Achebe would point to greater respect for women, and attention to the knowledge they had, as one possible way ahead for Nigerian society. He also inspected the toll of corruption in the new nation-state, and imagined alternative forms of social and governmental organization — multi-ethnic, -linguistic, and -religious, led by enlightened intellectuals — that drew from indigenous customs.

But even there, Achebe was hardly wishful. In his third novel, Arrow of God (1964), for instance, he portrayed a traditional village priest who seeks an accommodation with British administrators provided they do not compromise his standing with his people or with his gods. “I wanted to see what would happen if this story of the coming of the white man were told again, and you had a different person confronting them,” says Achebe. “Unfortunately, what I discovered was that it didn’t matter. He also came to a sticky end. In other words, what has come to the Igbo people is bigger than they can deal with.”

Click to read the complete article

Posted at 5:39 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Chronicle of Higher Education

Fifty years after he published Things Fall Apart, his first novel, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe recalls having modest hopes for the book. At the time, he was a young university graduate who had found a job at the Nigerian Broadcasting Company, in Lagos. “I was alone in my room, scribbling away, and if nobody had paid any attention at all to me, I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised,” Achebe recalls with a quiet chuckle, here in his home on the campus of Bard College.

Yet the towering achievement of Things Fall Apart has been to become arguably the most influential work of fiction by an African writer. Since William Heinemann Ltd. first issued it in London, the novel has sold about 11 million copies in some 50 countries and as many languages. (This month Anchor Books will issue a 50th-aniversary edition.) In the United States, in an era of multiculturalism, it has become a fixture on college and high-school reading lists — for Americans, the quintessential novel about Africa. The influential critic Harold Bloom included it in 1994 in his selection of the canonical works of world literature, along with two of Achebe’s later novels dealing with Nigeria’s transition through colonization to troubled independent nationhood, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God…

…In a 1975 lecture, and then in an essay, Achebe took Conrad to task for emerging in his seminal short novel, Heart of Darkness, as a “thoroughgoing racist” even as he denounced imperialism. Achebe pointed out that Conrad had deprived his African characters of any voice, granting them only eight caricaturing words in the whole short novel. Pointing, still today, to those meager eight words, he says: “That’s all that Africa has, of language; the rest is screaming, shrieking, howling — animal sounds, you see.”

His criticism of Conrad drew vigorous protest from the author’s defenders. But Achebe says his intention was simple: to ask “why does one go to Africa for this kind of exoticism that demeans people, makes them less than their worth?”

Things Fall Apart does not idealize Nigerians; far from it. In Okonkwo, for example, Achebe depicts courage and nobility but also ignorance and cruelty. The mighty Okonkwo beats his wives and kills a child. Fellow villagers leave twin infants in the bush to die because twins are considered evil, and mutilate the bodies of dead children so that their ogbanje, or spirits, do not return to torment their mothers again.

“There are some very hard things going on there,” says Achebe. “I knew that I had to be truthful. I don’t know why, because it’s just as easy to make the thing up a little. But I refused. I went out of my way to pick up, to find out, to learn as much of the bad things that were going on, and bring them in, deliberately.” His characters, he says, “have a dark side, if you like. But I dare you to say they are not human, in spite of that.”

Just as some African critics originally chided Achebe for writing in English, the language of the colonizer, some feminists also objected that female characters were not fully realized in Things Fall Apart. Achebe’s supporters responded that such criticism fell into the undergraduate trap of criticizing a work for what it was not, rather than viewing it for what it was. Achebe’s female characters, his defenders said, were crucial to the plot, and anything but stereotypes.

In later novels, Achebe would point to greater respect for women, and attention to the knowledge they had, as one possible way ahead for Nigerian society. He also inspected the toll of corruption in the new nation-state, and imagined alternative forms of social and governmental organization — multi-ethnic, -linguistic, and -religious, led by enlightened intellectuals — that drew from indigenous customs.

But even there, Achebe was hardly wishful. In his third novel, Arrow of God (1964), for instance, he portrayed a traditional village priest who seeks an accommodation with British administrators provided they do not compromise his standing with his people or with his gods. “I wanted to see what would happen if this story of the coming of the white man were told again, and you had a different person confronting them,” says Achebe. “Unfortunately, what I discovered was that it didn’t matter. He also came to a sticky end. In other words, what has come to the Igbo people is bigger than they can deal with.”

Click to read the complete article

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Copyright The Wall Street Journal
February 2, 2008; Page A10

Dante felt it long ago on the Tuscan plain, the turbid ebb and flow of midlife misery. In his opening to the “Inferno,” he furnished probably the most celebrated lines in the Western canon on the subject:

“In the middle of the road of my life/I recovered myself in a dark wood/ The right road being lost. It’s so hard to describe/ That wood so savage, dense, harsh/Just thinking of it renews my fear.”

It turns out he wasn’t alone. This week a massive American-British study of some two million souls throughout 80 countries confirms, empirically, that middle age immiserates us all without regard to income, culture, gender, marital status or previous experience. The study offers a new visual to illustrate the overarching mood swing of life: the U-Curve, in which mental stability and happiness bottoms out in our 40s and into our 50s.

We then get more cheerful as we round the curve and head into the final stretch. In the U.S., women hit bottom at 40 and men at 50, according to the study…

…One thinks of midlife turbulence as a time when people change, jobs, careers, partners. In Dante’s case, the upheaval had occurred already. He’d lost the once-straight road. His moral universe upended, he had to reimagine its symmetry and begin the machete work of ordering and naming his way through the confusion of the Inferno and its nine circles, and then on to Purgatorio, Paradiso.

One suspects that, with women and men both, midlife is a time when the mirage of life’s perfectibility and symmetry, as envisioned in one’s youth, comes back to trouble you like a conscience. In plain language, one might call it a last chance at happiness, or of “getting it right.”

Midlife is perhaps the last opportunity to shape your fate before you have to accept it; a phase when you are suddenly taunted by the lives unlived because you can still, though only just, try to live them; a time when you can still become what you might have been. Equally, it’s the last time when you are troubled by a pretty face — another path not taken — before you can look on pretty faces with equanimity, not as bearing a direct message to you, but to other, younger folk.

Midlife is a last chance to keep your word with the 10-year-old you once were, who looked forward at life and made a pact with the future. You wake up in middle age to feel you have drifted. Amid a solid family, wife and job, you might feel a kind of awakening, though possibly a delusional one fueled by chemistry. The feeling might haunt you into one last eruptive attempt at realignment.

What then would be the “right” road: To keep to one’s groove, or to opt for the road not taken? Luckily, the study tells us, once past 50 you won’t care either way. Hang in there. It will all blow over. If Dante had only known. He may never have troubled us with The Divine Comedy.

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Posted at 3:24 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

An extract:

Fear and those who fatten on it spread vile lies about Obama’s religion, his past drug use, his views on Israel and the Jews. Fear makes us see the world purely in terms of enemies and perils, and leads us to seek out the promise of leadership, however spurious it proves to be, among those who speak the language of that doomed and demeaning, that inhuman view of the world.

But the most pitiable fear of all is the fear of disappointment, of having our hearts broken and our hopes dashed by this radiant, humane politician who seems not just with his words but with every step he takes, simply by the fact of his running at all, to promise so much for our country, for our future and for the eventual state of our national soul. I say “pitiable” because this fear of disappointment, which I hear underlying so many of the doubts that people express to me, is ultimately a fear of finding out the truth about ourselves and the extent of the mess that we have gotten ourselves into. If we do fight for Obama, work for him, believe in him, vote for him, and the man goes down to defeat by the big-money machines and the merchants of fear, then what hope will we have left to hold on to?

Thus in the name of preserving hope do we disdain it. That is how a phobocracy maintains its grip on power.

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Posted at 5:22 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: February 4, 2008

WUHAN, China — As an 18-year-old student with an interest in the Internet, Zhu Nan had been itching to say something about the country’s pervasive online censorship system, widely known here as the Great Firewall.

When China’s censors began blocking access to the popular photo-sharing site Flickr, Mr. Zhu felt the moment had come. Writing on his blog last year, the student, who is now a freshman at a university in this city, questioned the rationale for Internet restrictions, and in subsequent posts, began passing along tips on how to evade them.

“Officials in our country claimed that Internet censorship is done according to the law,” Mr. Zhu wrote. “If so, why not let people know about this legal project, and why, instead, ban the Web sites that publicize and examine those legal policies? If you’re determined to do this, you shouldn’t be afraid of criticism.”

Mr. Zhu’s obscure blog post and his subsequent activism is a small part of what many here regard as a watershed moment. In recent months, China’s censors have tightened controls over the Internet, often blacking out sites that had no discernible political content. In the process, they have fostered a backlash, as many people who previously had little interest in politics have become active in resisting the controls.

And all of it comes at a time of increasing risk for those who choose to protest. Human rights advocates say the government has been broadening its crackdown on any signs of dissent as the Olympic Games in Beijing draw near.

For a vast majority of Internet users, censorship still does not appear to be much of a factor. The most popular Web applications here are games and messaging services, and the most visited Internet sites focus on everyday subjects like entertainment news and sports. Many, in fact, seem only vaguely aware that China’s Internet universe is carefully pruned, and even among those who know, a majority hardly seems to care.

But growing numbers of others are becoming increasingly resentful of restrictions on a wide range of Web sites, including Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace (sometimes), Blogspot and many other sites that the public sees as sources of harmless diversion or information. The mounting resentment has inspired a wave of increasingly determined social resistance of a kind that is uncommon in China.

This resistance is taking many forms, from lawsuits by Internet users against government-owned service providers, claiming that the blocking of sites is illegal, to a growing network of software writers who develop code aimed at overcoming the restrictions. An Internet-based word-of-mouth campaign has taken shape, in which bloggers and Web page owners post articles to spread awareness of the Great Firewall, or share links to programs that will help evade it.

In almost every instance, the resistance has been fired by the surprise and indignation when people bumped up against a system that they had only vaguely suspected existed. “I had had an impression that some kind of mechanism controls the Internet in China, but I had no idea about the Great Firewall,” said Pan Liang, a writer of children’s literature and a Web site operator who first learned the extent of the controls after a friend’s blog was blocked. “I was really annoyed at first,” Mr. Pan said. “Then the 17th Party Congress came, and I received an order that my Web site, which is about children’s literature, had to close its message board. It made me even angrier.”

Like others, Mr. Pan used his Web page to post solutions for overcoming the restrictions to some banned sites, and then he used a historical allusion to mock his country’s censorship system.

“Many people don’t know that 300 years after Emperor Kangxi ordered an end to construction of the Great Wall, our great republic has built an invisible great wall,” he wrote. “Can blocking really work? Kangxi knew the Great Wall was a huge lie: just think how many soldiers are needed to guard those thousands of miles.”

A 17-year-old blogger from Guangdong Province who posted instructions on how to get to YouTube, overcoming the firewall’s restrictions, was no less philosophical. “I don’t know if it’s better to speak out or keep silent, but if everyone keeps silent, the truth will be buried,” wrote the girl, who uses the online name Ruyue. “I don’t want to be silent, even if everyone else shuts up.”

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Posted at 12:29 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The new York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: February 4, 2008

SHANGHAI — For two weeks running, much of this country, long known for its capacity for mass mobilization, has been tied in knots by a series of major snowstorms.

Although the snowfall has been described as the worst here in 50 years, it has been nothing like the deep cover that blankets parts of New England or the upper Midwest in many winters.

But its crippling effect seems to have been mostly because of surprise. The storm knocked out electricity and water supplies, threatened the coal supply that fuels the country’s power plants and stranded millions of Chinese on the eve of the year’s most important holiday.

Many of the worst effects have been in parts of east-central and southern China, which are largely unaccustomed to serious snowfall.

Many victims, however — as many as 100 million people were directly affected — equate surprise on such a huge scale with lack of preparation.

For migrant workers unable to take their annual leave for the Lunar New Year, or for others stuck at home without electricity, water, regular supplies of food or even reliable news, the government, instead of an unpredictable weather system, increasingly appears to be the culprit.

In the last week the Chinese government has worked as hard at public relations over the crisis as it has over crisis management itself.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who has traveled around affected areas almost nonstop, went early in the week to the southern city of Guangzhou, where as many as 800,000 people had gathered at the train station at one point seeking to begin their annual vacations.

President Hu Jintao went to a coal mine in northern Shaanxi Province to encourage miners to redouble their efforts, including forgoing New Year celebrations, to spare the country’s power grid from further brownouts. Mr. Hu, who is known for his circumspection in public, was quoted as saying he was unable to sleep because of the scale of the emergency.

But in many badly affected areas the government seems to have almost disappeared, so overwhelmed it has been by the demand for emergency services. In other areas poor coordination between levels of government and among various agencies has seriously complicated matters.

“The main problem is lack of preparedness,” said Luo Shihong, a relief volunteer in Guiyang, in Guizhou Province. “By late January both the government and people thought the sky would clear up in a couple of days and it would be over. The officials had a lot of confidence initially, then a day or two later they discovered how unprepared they were mentally, physically and in terms of manpower.”

Xie Yonggang, a crisis management expert in northeastern Heilongjiang Province, had a similar explanation: “Despite the weather forecasts, the transportation department didn’t realize how serious this was until all the roads were already blocked.”

In Guangzhou, the capital of southeastern Guangdong Province, which has the largest concentration of migrant labor, these crossed signals may have narrowly missed causing disaster among the desperate crowds stranded at the train station.

Provincial authorities have worked hard for days to convince would-be travelers to abandon their plans to spend the holidays with family in faraway provinces, arranging ticket refunds, setting up shelters and offering nonstop propaganda about the money-saving virtues of staying put. Several hundred thousand people were gradually persuaded to leave the area of the train station.

On Thursday, though, a spokesman for the Railway Ministry said anyone wishing to travel home by train from Guangdong Province would be able to do so within five days. That brought a new surge of passengers, worsening the potentially explosive scene at the station.

Two people reportedly died at the station on Sunday, one crushed in a stampede and the other electrocuted as he tried to jump aboard a train.

“The Railway Ministry has a tone that is different from that of Guangdong, whose attitude had been clear,” said Wen Yunchao, a freelance Internet journalist. It would have been better to hold back as many people as possible so that some could go, instead of telling everyone they could go, he said.

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Posted at 12:26 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 3, 2008

TOKYO — As the United States frets noisily about a recession, Japan is quietly enduring a far more fundamental economic slide, one that seems irreversible.

This country, which got rich quick in a postwar miracle of manufacturing and alarmed Americans by buying up baubles such as Rockefeller Center, is steadily slipping backward as a major economic force.

Fifteen years ago, Japan ranked fourth among the world’s countries in gross domestic product per capita. It now ranks 20th. In 1994, its share of the world’s economy peaked at 18 percent; in 2006, the number was below 10 percent.

The government acknowledged last month what has long been obvious to economists and foreign investors, if not to the Japanese public and many politicians. The minister of economic and fiscal policy, Hiroko Ota, told parliament that Japan could no longer be described as a “first-class” economy.

“I have a sense of crisis because Japan has not nurtured industries that will grow in the future,” said Ota, who offered no specific remedies for the crisis.

Japan is still the world’s second-largest economy, as measured by gross size, although the island nation has been surpassed by China in purchasing power. In coming decades, the economies of China and India will dwarf Japan’s, according to many projections. By 2050, Japan’s economy will be about the size of Indonesia’s or Brazil’s, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Japan’s slide relative to other major economies is not a tabloid tale of suddenly squandered riches. It is rather an insidious petering out of growth, productivity and innovation — and of political will to stop the slippage.

The slide has dovetailed with another quietly insidious crisis — the petering out of the population. Japan has the world’s highest proportion of elderly people and the lowest proportion of children.

By 2050, population decline will have reduced economic growth to zero, according to the Japan Center for Economic Research. Seventy percent of the country’s labor force will have disappeared.

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Posted at 9:33 AM · Comments (0)

Letter from China
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Published: February 1, 2008

SHANGHAI: Snow blankets much of China, including parts of the south, where real cold is an infrequent visitor.

It has been repeated over and over again that there has been nothing like this in 50 years.

All across China, power cables have drooped and snapped under the weight of the ice, hanging heavy like stalactites. Highways have been closed because of the snowfall, leaving drivers stranded in their cars or in service stations awaiting rescue.

More dramatically still, trains have been knocked out of service on the country’s most important routes, leaving mind-boggling numbers of passengers, most of them migrant workers, without a way home for the annual Spring Festival, the most important holiday on the Chinese calendar.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, the figure who excels at putting a human face on Chinese politics like none other these days, took the extraordinary step of flying to the southern city of Guangzhou to address a crowd of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who were desperate for seats on trains that weren’t coming. And he did it in an extraordinary way, with a rare touch of humility.

First, Wen, the prime minister of the world’s most populous nation, began by introducing himself: “Hello everyone,” he said, “I’m Wen Jiabao.” There was more to it, though, than just the modesty. Inadvertently or not, Wen’s words spoke to the huge gap between China’s rulers and its ruled, a gap that his personal style has often labored to overcome.

It was a quiet but powerful recognition of the fact that the millions of migrant workers who keep the country’s economy churning are too busy, or too poor, too tired or too alienated, to have followed the news on television closely enough to recognize their country’s second-highest official simply by seeing him before a crowd with a megaphone. Or was it that they never dreamed that someone like him would come to address them?

Wen was not finished surprising, though. Moments later, he voiced an apology for the difficulties the stormy weather has imposed on so many. He actually said, “I apologize.”

It would not be an exaggeration to say that China’s big snowstorm has revealed an embarrassing crisis of, well, crisis management in this country. There seems to have been an utter lack of preparedness for anything like a weather emergency of these proportions, an appreciation of which was not lost on many Chinese, including the propaganda system, which has worked overtime to combat this impression.

The rule of thumb in matters like these is that a people’s expectations rise in proportion to a country’s successes. China’s recent successes, needless to say, have been immense, and, as any number of commentators pointed out, a country that is capable of putting astronauts in space and being host to big ceremonies, as one online commentator remarked (read a coy reference to the Olympics), should be able to keep the highways open and the trains running, too, snow or no snow.

By this standard, the Great Snowstorm of 2008 has been a public image disaster for the Chinese government - not vis-à-vis whatever foreigners might think about the country, an area that President Hu Jintao, in a bit of unfortunate timing, recently said merits a major new propaganda drive, but rather in terms of the much more important question of how Chinese see their government and its ability to provide basic services.

To get a sense of how this works, one need only think back to the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts in the United States, and the impact that fiasco had on the standing of President George W. Bush and the image of his government.

The United States, however, has mechanisms for dealing with crises of governance like this; there are no remote equivalents in China. Most important, of course, is the possibility of “throwing the bums out,” meaning by ballot box. There is also, obviously, no press in China that can freely criticize the government when the failings are monumental.

The real scandal of China’s weather emergency is that it had been going on for weeks, largely uncovered and not treated as an emergency for most of that time. That is because the heavy snows that have been accumulating in central China were falling on places far out of the spotlight.

There is an inclination in autocratic political cultures to think that allowing the press to report freely would constitute subversion and destabilize the government. On the contrary, elections and the freedom to criticize are important not just because they help keep politicians honest, but because they serve as escape valves for pressures that could become dangerous otherwise.

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Posted at 10:08 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

An excerpt.

This is a question that will be increasingly asked in the years to come. It is already being asked in a few circles, as we strive to understand the larger implications of the enormous surpluses of sovereign wealth funds, the soaring cost of raw materials (especially oil and gas), the weakening of Wall Street’s once-great banks, and the increasing purchase of American assets by dollar-rich Asian and Middle Eastern enterprises.

The argument goes something like this: The United States has recently expended vast amounts of money, blood and energy in fighting two Iraq wars. On each occasion, the White House had its own secular reasons for going to war (to punish aggression, to protect American consumers from catastrophically high gas prices, and so on). But the chief beneficiaries were clearly our Arab allies like Saudia Arabia and the Gulf states, together with East Asia and Europe, which depend much more than the U.S. does on the uninterrupted flow of Middle East Oil. How convenient to live under the American strategic umbrella.

Yet all the fighting by the U.S. armed forces in those wars has not been able to prevent the great rise in the price of oil and gas, which hits petroleum-dependent Americans hard but puts billions of dollars into the pockets of certain free riders in the system. As the United States takes its economic hits - and while the White House insists on record defense spending to maintain its hegemonic “umbrella strategy” - foreign financial interests are steadily acquiring American companies, especially banks. And Wall Street houses now paying the price for their reckless stoking of dubious subprime loans have little alternative but to sell; as I write, some chief executive will be flying to Dubai or Singapore to sell off a chunk of the firm’s assets.

Those bankers, and the free-market economists who service them, will assure you that such asset sales are perfectly O.K. Asian and Arabic sovereign wealth funds are extremely discreet and cautious. They do not play politics. They are not asking for a seat on the board. They have to invest their monies somewhere. So this is just a normal commercial transaction. Stop worrying.

Well, if you think that way, then nothing can be done to help you. But every sensible homeowner or farmer or small businessman knows that, once you take out a loan (mortgage) from another party, or sell a share of your property, a subtle or not-so-subtle power relationship has changed. To a greater or lesser degree, you have become dependent upon other players who can probably influence you more than you can influence them. And in this case, since hundreds of other companies and banks are doing the same, the collective result is that the United States is ceding influence.

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Posted at 11:27 PM · Comments (0)

The details of my two shows featuring my Disappearing Shanghai work have finally come together after lots of intensive labor. The Shanghai invitation is copied below. A smaller version of the show opens at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum of Washington University, in St. Louis, on February 8, 2008. I’ll be visiting St. Louis early the following week to give a talk there.
Details can be found at: http://kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/exhibitions.html
Visitors to my other, all photography website, whose link is in the upper right hand corner of this page can get a sense of my work through the Disappearing Shanghai gallery posted there.

That website is in the midst of a badly needed redesign, but some of the images from my two shows can be found there nonetheless.

By the way, I have less than 200 copies remaining of the catalog from my October 2006 Berlin show of Disappearing Shanghai. It’s nicely printed, and the price is $20 plus handling, a virtual steal. Get them while you can!

Posted at 12:10 PM · Comments (0)

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