« May 2007 | Main | July 2007 » June 2007 ArchivesJune 21, 2007Atlantic blog productivity to fall by 1%On a typical day the five members of the Atlantic's crack blogging team bring you about 100 items, one of them by me. For the next while, readers will have to get along with about 99. I am journeying from Shanghai to realms beyond the Internets, returning patriotically around July 4. Be brave! June 20, 2007Microsoft, Google, and desktop search (updated, after jump)Too much is still unclear about the latest Google-Microsoft staredown (over Vista's "Instant Search" disk-search function) to hazard any larger opinion about its implications or merits. It got my attention for this simple reason: it reassured me that I wasn't going crazy. At least not in this particular way. Under the reported terms of the settlement, Microsoft will change Vista so that users can turn off the search function that now comes built-in and turned on. For several months I have been driving myself crazy and feeling like an idiot because I had such trouble doing just that. Continue reading "Microsoft, Google, and desktop search (updated, after jump)" » June 18, 2007This strikes me as an important search engine storyVia Network World, a report that appears to validate something I have long suspected: what you find, when you're searching the web, depends very heavily on which search engine you use. That is, rather than Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, Alta Vista, Ask, etc providing overlapping views of the central data repository that is the World Wide Web, each returns a particular sampling of that data, which can differ to a startling degree from the other samples. For instance, the study compared the first-page searches from major engines and found that on average:
Continue reading "This strikes me as an important search engine story" » I'm mad at Earthlink. Or maybe it's mad at me?Here's the scenario: 1) Someone with an @Earthlink.com email address sends me a message. [Correction: I mean @Earthlink.net] 2) I write back. 3) I get a charming, mock-affable message from the Earthlink spam filter saying that my reply has been blocked. (Sample, with identifying details removed, at end of post.) I assume this is because my IP address shows that I'm in China. Or because I'm using a wi-fi system with dynamic IP address assignment. Or something. Whatever it is, other email systems are able to cope with it. This bounceback happens whenever someone from @Earthlink.com sends me mail. It does not happen (so far) with anyone else. Continue reading "I'm mad at Earthlink. Or maybe it's mad at me?" » June 16, 2007How media "guidance" works in ChinaThe local Chinese- and English-language press has carried many stories about the Shanxi province brick kilns in in which large numbers of people, many of them children, had been captured and forced to work in slave-labor conditions. These are horrifying stories, and the state-controlled media, rather than trying to rationalize them away, has generally moved into muckraker mode with hunts for the malefactors. But a translated document on China Digital Times, from UC Berkeley, is as sobering in its own way. The site carries what it says is a translation of a memo from the Communist Party's Central Office of External Communication, which offers this guidance about the unsettling news. Corey Lidle crash: just about the last wordLast month, when the National Transportation Safety Board released its "Final Report" on the Corey Lidle crash, I mentioned its conclusion here:
Because I was at the time en route to Burma, land of (among other things) little internet coverage, I did not then see two graphics-rich parts of the NTSB's proceedings. Recently I took a look at them: they are usefully, if tragically, clarifying. Continue reading "Corey Lidle crash: just about the last word" » June 15, 2007Surprise post-9/11 movie tipI liked the book but was in no hurry to see the movie version of David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars. As Pacific Northwest atmospherics it was great; as a mystery it was very good; as a story of star-crossed love it was not that interesting to me; and as a reminder of the racial injustices against Japanese-Americans in World War II it was worthy but I thought already got the point. Now I realize: that was pre-9/11 thinking. (The movie came out in 1999.) June 14, 2007Death and taxes, inevitable; anything about China, notI agree with Matthew Yglesias's recent point that America's stakes and interests in China will and should affect U.S. politics more than they do now. (I mean, how could I not think that, given my current location?) I also agree that the articles he cites, while different in specific emphasis, reflect a common perspective that the U.S. has been duped by the Chinese, or has duped itself for reasons of laziness or self-interest. But as a marker for later discussions, it's worth distinguishing one of these possible delusions from all the others. That is the idea that as China modernizes, it will inevitably become more democratic and less repressive. Everyone has heard the argument: the internet and mobile phones will make it impossible for the regime to maintain control; once people can go to Starbucks, they'll want choice in many other ways as well; a new generation will be open to the world and impossible to fool; and so on. James Mann's valuable short book, The China Fantasy is packed with examples of Americans talking this way. Continue reading "Death and taxes, inevitable; anything about China, not" » Worth checking out: the new Ask.comI love Google. Everyone loves Google. But I’ve also had a long secret fondness for Ask.com, nee AskJeeves. The original AskJeeves concept of trying to figure out what questions users might eventually ask, and preparing answers for them, had some obvious limitations. (Same ones that are evident in the typical FAQ file.) But over the last year or two Ask’s search system has introduced enough features and tweaks to be worth visiting along with Google. For instance, I’ve found that its image search gets more quickly to what I’m looking for than most alternatives. Recently Ask rolled out the new search page it has been working on for quite a while. Unconvincing article by Michael GersonBack in the Reagan era, Republicans used to go on the warpath against the first sign of “moral equivalence.” This was the idea that the warts and imperfections of the United States were in any way comparable to those of the Soviet Empire. If Democrats like Mario Cuomo (the rhetorically-entrancing Barack Obama of his day) or Walter Mondale said that Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy was too aggressive or his military buildup too costly, a Republican chorus would immediately spring up to say: There they go again! It’s “moral equivalence” to put any blame at all on the United States rather than focusing all criticism on Soviet tyranny. I agree that the American idea is attractive and good. I agree that the Soviet empire was brutal and bad. But in practice “moral equivalence” was a way of trying to delegitimize any critical analysis, by Americans, of American policy. Sort of the same function as “we are a nation at war” or “that will only help the terrorists,” when those phrases had silencing power in the first two or three years after 9/11. Now we have a breathtaking example of moral equivalence from an unlikely source. It’s Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for our current president Bush, lamenting in the Washington Post the abandonment by both political parties of the “centrist” tradition of Bill Clinton and G.W. Bush June 13, 2007The Chinese tennis festival continuesIt’s not just Ashe-Connors or McEnroe-Borg. Tonight Macau TV brings me Chris Evert vs Martina Navratilova, Wimbledon finals, 1978. The one, like McEnroe-Borg three years later, looks quite retro. Evert, then 23, still has baby fat. Navratilova — 21 years old, pre-blonde, pre-defection to the US, pre-out, pre-chic — has very dark chestnut hair and a clunky Eastern Bloc look. Both women use wooden rackets. Why look at these old matches, given my previous protestation that sports is worth watching only if you don’t know how things turn out? Because there is a different kind of real-time tension built into the matches. June 12, 2007Well, it's not the Cambodian soccer playoffsFirst, live coverage on CCTV of the Nadal-Federer French Open finals. Then, last night, on Macau TV, a full replay of Arthur Ashe’s sublime victory over Jimmy Connors in the 1975 Wimbledon finals. Despite the many passing decades, both of them look surprisingly contemporary. Partly testimony to Connors’ having aged well; partly, that this must have been one of the very first finals in which both players used non-wooden rackets. Now, also in Macau, John McEnroe vs. Bjorn Borg, Wimbledon finals, 1981. I know — I remember — how this turned out. Continue reading "Well, it's not the Cambodian soccer playoffs" » You say Pataki, I say PatacaI am in Macau again, another southern Chinese haunt I’ve seen nearly as often as Shenzhen. I know it is wrong, very wrong — and ignorant, too! — to judge this way, but: Macau will seem more august when its currency is called something other than the “pataca.” “That will be 2,000 patacas, please.” Or maybe it’s not that wrong. Maybe Macau’s Chinese-speaking majority agrees! The Portuguese words printed on Macau banknotes (this was, of course, once a Portuguese colony) say cinquenta patacas, etc. But the Chinese characters on the pataca bills list the currency as 圓 — our old friend yuan, the same name used throughout the Chinese mainland on People’s Republic of China banknotes. (There it takes the “simplified” form 圆.) Here is one case where oddly-translated Western words are actually a blessing. 'The World' radio interview now postedA few days ago I talked with Lisa Mullins, of the public radio program ‘The World,’ about my current story on the factory-land of southern China. The interview was broadcast yesterday in two parts, here and here. The whole program lineup for yesterday’s show is here. In reciprocity to the show for its attention, I’ll spell out that The World is co-produced by the BBC and PRI and WGBH in Boston. And it’s a show I’ve always liked. June 11, 2007Words of Wisdom from a Chinese officialNo, not about the Sopranos. Didn’t see any of this season; don’t want to hear or read about the finale; will get the whole-season boxed set for $5 or so from the local dealer when it’s ready in the next few days. According to today’s (English-language, state-controlled) China Daily, the vice-minister of Construction, Qiu Baoxing, has noticed that non-stop bulldozing, paving, and skyscraper-building have been less than ideal for China’s cultural and architectural patrimony. Indeed, he goes so far as to compare the cultural/architectural effects of today’s gilded age construction boom to those of China’s two outright catastrophes of the past half century: the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Continue reading "Words of Wisdom from a Chinese official" » June 10, 2007Sunday update: Oddball Chinese versions of Western namesI mentioned earlier that I had a hard time asking people in Shanghai where the gigantic Carrefour store might be, because — silly me! — I hadn’t guessed that the name would be phoneticized into Mandarin as jia le fu. Once I finally saw the Chinese characters I realized how they should be pronounced, but by that time I was standing in front of the store. In his interesting blog from Kunming, American Matt Schiavenza discusses the general phenomenon of phoneticized names — and offers one hypothesis for why names in Mandarin bear so little resemblance to the Western term they supposedly represent. Many big Western companies, he points out, came to Hong Kong before they came to mainland China. There they were given Chinese names that, as pronounced in Cantonese, made some sense. McDonald’s, for instance, is known by the characters 麦当劳. In Hong Kong’s Cantonese, that would be pronounced mak dong lo. Not bad! But when the same characters are used in Beijing or Shanghai, they are read in Mandarin as mai dang lao, which brings us back to the Carrefour / jialefu predicament. Similarly, as this site points out, the characters for Pizza Hut are pronounced pi sang hak in Cantonese, where they were first applied — but bi sheng ke in Mandarin. Here endeth the Sunday updates. Sunday update: China making me a better person (sort of)When the Australian (tennis) Open was on TV back in January, I noted that this was the first time Chinese television had shown any sport I cared about in the slightest — other than in pure curiosity fashion, like the Cambodian soccer playoffs. And, as I noted, in the absence of watchable sports suddenly I had all this time that in my previous life I had devoted to seeing what was happening to the Redskins, or in the Final Four, or with my kids’ childhood idol Mike Mussina (based on his days as an Oriole), or in general any real-time interesting sports contest. As i write, the most graceful tennis player anyone now living has ever seen, Roger Federer, is struggling to shake off a one-set deficit and a plague of sloppy errors against Rafael Nadal in the French Open final. And Chinese TV is carrying it live! I am fascinated, and again I’m reminded: this is how I used to spend my time. Ah well, I can tell myself that I’m getting language benefits too. If you want an endless-repetition drill on how the Chinese word for “beautiful,” 漂亮 or piaoliang, is pronounced, just watch one of Federer’s matches (even this one, despite the errors) as covered by CCTV5. Sunday update: Chinese medical careMy friend Adam Minter, who has a blog here and a very good article in the current issue of the Atlantic here, says that I should be grateful that my recent Chinese operation involved an offending item so small that it was vaporized in the process of being removed. Otherwise, he says (based on first-hand observation), I could have expected to be be presented with the excised cyst — or vertebra, or tonsil, or tumor — as soon as the operation was over, as proof that the work was done to spec. More or less the way you’d expect to get the old oil filter back after a car oil change — except, Adam says, that the parts he’s seen returned have been nicely boxed and gift-wrapped, like candy. Sunday update: "Trenton Makes"I learn from my friend Charles Stevenson that I am not the only one with an ancestral tie to Trenton’s days of manufacturing glory. I met Stevenson back at the dawn of time, when I was briefly a freshman member of the college debate team and he was the grad-student coach. He now informs me that his wife’s grandfather, S. Roy Heath, owner of the Heath Lumber Company in Trenton, was the creator of the slogan back in 1910. In fact Heath won $25 in a contest sponsored by Trenton Chamber of Commerce to come up with the phrase that best captured the city’s spirit. Charlie Stevenson was too modest to tell me that Heath went on to become a New Jersey state senator — and, much more impressive, that his family’s business, unlike my family’s, is still open today. Apparently it still features another of S. Roy Heath’s literary creations: the company motto, “If it’s in the woods, Heath can furnish the goods.” This kind of literary talent will always find an outlet. (Speaking of literary talent, Charlie Stevenson’s book about the structural impossibility of leading the Pentagon, SECDEF, is actually very good.) June 8, 2007No wonder I can't find anythingSeveral days ago I was looking for the entrance to one of the big Carrefour outlets in Shanghai. This is the French-based retailer that is second to Wal-Mart in overall global sales but is far more successful than Wal-Mart in China. A Wal-Mart official once told me that he thought hostility to recent U.S. foreign policy had been a drag on the firm’s brand-image in China. Who knows — that certainly hasn’t slowed down McDonald’s, Apple, Dell, Buick, or Starbucks. On a sidewalk I asked a security guard, in Chinese, where the store might be. The “could you tell me where” part of the question seemed to come across serviceably. But the store’s name, as I phrased it, led to a look of utter bafflement on the guard’s face. I used the Chinese sounds I thought most comparable — ka ri fu ah — and added the words for department store, but I got nowhere. Then I stepped back and looked up, and saw that the guard and I were standing right in front of Carrefour’s main entrance. I thanked him and stepped into the store, only to wonder: how can this be? I mean, apart from cognitive failure on the guard’s side, and linguistic on mine? June 7, 2007My great big $30 Chinese operation (update)Bandage came off today; nose looks fine! Or more precisely, no worse than it ever has. So my first encounter with an outsourced, “China price” medical procedure is a success. Actually, the moral is the same one I discuss in my Shenzhen article in the current issue. As explained by Liam Casey, the article’s “Mr. China” and a man whose daily work is connecting North American or European companies with suppliers in China: "People think China is cheap, but really, it's fast." Being told by the surgeon “you can go” five minutes after I walk in the clinic door would certainly qualify as fast. But I guess a total price, with all administrative fees, of $32 qualifies on the “cheap” front too. June 6, 2007A personal note about manufacturingThe title of my latest article in the Atlantic is “China Makes, the World Takes.” The title wasn’t my idea– I believe it came from Corby Kummer, who edited this article as he has nearly everything I’ve written for the magazine in the last 25 years. But the instant I heard it I thought: yes, that’s right. It exactly suits the argument of the article. And as a bonus, it has great family and emotional resonance for me. The title of course is a play on the famous slogan spelled out in neon lights over the Delaware River bridge in Trenton, New Jersey: “Trenton Makes, The World Takes.” What is Rudy Giuliani talking about???This is what I am denied, or spared, by being trapped in Chinese factories or hospitals and getting only intermittent glimpses of real-time Campaign 2008 rhetoric: Rudy Giuliani’s answer to the first substantive question of the debate. Knowing everything we know now, good idea or bad idea to have invaded Iraq?
Huh???? June 4, 2007My visit to the Shanghai Skin Disease and Sexually Transmitted Disease HospitalIt started two weeks ago: drinks on a beautiful Shanghai evening with a visiting American couple at Barbarossa, a surreal Arabic-themed indoor/outdoor restaurant right in People’s Square. The husband was a doctor, here for a consultation on product-safety issues. “I’m a dermatologist, and so….” I stop listening to the sentence at that point but corner him as we’re leaving. “Funny you should mention you’re a dermatologist. Would you mind taking a look at….?” People ask me this kind of favor all the time, and I usually say yes. (Will I read Cousin Sally’s book manuscript? Can I suggest a publisher for a collection of poems?) In the cycle of karma, it was my turn to ask advice. That very morning I had noticed a tiny rough patch of skin on the bridge of my nose. Just the normal collapse and decay, or something more specific to worry about? Continue reading "My visit to the Shanghai Skin Disease and Sexually Transmitted Disease Hospital" » June 1, 2007Fighters planes over Shanghai (cont): Back to DEFCON5According to a Shanghainese friend (whose name I’m omitting because, really, how much good can it do a Chinese citizen to be seeing discussing anything fighter-plane related with a foreign journalist?), the planes I saw zooming overhead recently were probably just on a training mission from a local air field. Sure enough, a quick check with Google Earth shows an obviously- military airfield just north of town, on Chongming Island at the mouth of the mighty Yangtze. Continue reading "Fighters planes over Shanghai (cont): Back to DEFCON5" » Bancroft family: seriously, don't sell to MurdochThe Bancroft family, which controls the Wall Street Journal, has now decided to listen to Rupert Murdoch’s pitch to buy the newspaper. OK, listen. But please, God, don’t sell. The tragedy of late 20th century American journalism, in a nutshell, is its conversion from a special kind of business to just another business. Continue reading "Bancroft family: seriously, don't sell to Murdoch" » More good news about American MuslimsLast fall, in an Atlantic cover story called “Declaring Victory,” I discussed the one big advantage the United States held over most European countries when it came to dealing with Islamic terrorists: the loyalty and assimilation of America’s Muslim and Arabic-origin populations. The two categories are not identical — many U.S. Muslims are from Pakistan, India, Iran, or other non-Arab countries; many Arab-Americans are non-Islamic, especially Lebanese Christians — but they are similar in overall success in America and resistance to extremist views. For instance (from that article):
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Blind Into Baghdad: America's War In Iraq
Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel
Breaking the News
Looking at the Sun
