Lionel Shriver Warns Readers Not to Meet Their Favorite Authors
Credit.Rebecca Clarke
May 27, 2021
“The warts-and-all version is almost always a disappointment, and they risk a retroactive taint,” says the novelist, whose forthcoming book is “Should We Stay or Should We Go.”
What books are on your night stand?
Two books to prime for my next novel: Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer” and Charles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” One exercise in reverse research writing the novel first and then doing the homework: Katie Engelhart’s “The Inevitable,” about end-of-life suicide. Finally, mercifully, fiction: Ewan Morrison’s “How to Survive Everything,” which sounds like an antidote to the Engelhart.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Contrary to what many scholars expected back in January 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic did not become China’s Chernobyl moment. Instead, more than a year later, the world has fallen into a collective amnesia that is familiar to Chinese citizens.
As Kai Strittmatter pointed out in his book
We Have Been Harmonized (2020), although the Chinese government’s cover up in the early stages of the pandemic caused the virus to spread rapidly around the world, China’s propaganda machine “harnessed the virus for itself in the competition between systems”. While many democratic countries still struggle to contain the virus, China proudly presents itself as “the country with superior political system and therefore had what it takes to become the new global leader”.
From Walkout to Wipe Out
Turkey s prime minister Erdogan walked out of the World Economic Forum in Davos in an argument over the Israeli military operation in Gaza – and received a hero s welcome back home. A cheap triumph that could cost him and his country dearly, writes Kai Strittmatter
Gesture of defiance: an angry Erdogan broke off a podium discussion with Peres in Davos on the recent Israeli military campaign in Gaza
Two men summoned up a respectful tone for each other, although they don t usually get on. A bridge was built across the rifts of a longstanding hostility. With sobriety and pragmatism, they worked towards solving a decades-old and highly emotional conflict.
Book Review: Life in China’s Surveillance State
BY
April 17, 2021
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t is a cliché to say, but China is an exceedingly complex country, better yet, civilization, with a deep, rich history, diverse culture, and dynamic politics. When adding on the difficulty of learning Mandarin and Cantonese, the often-dual meaning of characters, words, and phrases, and the often-opaque nature of official business and political dealings, understanding China would better be described as art and science and something even after a lifetime of study, one suspects they would only be scratching the surface.
This opacity and difficulty are not merely philosophical considerations but have tangible, real-world effects. How the Chinese Communist Party presents itself to the world is not how it presents itself to the Chinese people. Hierarchies and structures, when mapped against similar Western entities, present a false appearance of that which matters and where one stands in the political pecking or
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