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...China Books vary greatly in quality, but even the best leave me cold due to their bird's-eye view of the P.R.C. Adopting an Olympian perspective, their authors tend to use broad strokes to portray things that actually require a fine-grained touch. For example, most treat China's population as an undifferentiated mass, or one that can be bisected along just one axis: be it the 90% Han and 10% non-Han ethnic divide, the clear ideological fault line between loyalists and dissidents, and so on. And they often buy into the cozy but distorting official myth...
...Fortunately, Big China Books are not the only option for general readers curious about the P.R.C., since many significant works that take a ground-level view of the country, rather than a bird's-eye one, have also been appearing. I am thinking, for example, of Fast Boat to China (2007). This is a lively account of the human side of Shanghai-based outsourcing by Andrew Ross, who usefully dubs his study a foray into "scholarly reporting" - a term for books that, as he puts it, have "mined the overlap between ethnography and journalism...
...terms it was "effectively a suicide note" when it came to the search business, as one rival Internet executive put it. "Google is done in China, at least for now." If you Google Baidu, nearly every press story that pops up will mention its fierce rivalry with the Mountain View, Calif., company. Baidu executives now don't quite know what to make of the prospect of life without it. "Things have gotten very strange very quickly," says one. (See 25 sites we can't live without...
...perfect subject for the Supreme Court: nothing revs up Justices like a symbolic fight over an intractable issue. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the court struck down certain limits on corporate campaign spending--upholding the First Amendment or selling American politics into bondage, depending on your view...
...healthy and robust space program generates not just national esteem and extraordinary people but other developments as well, including the discovery of global warming, smoke detectors, and bar codes. And if one takes a long-term view of civilization, human expansion in our solar system is as inevitable as the journeys made across the Atlantic Ocean that ended in the New World. The solar system as a whole has land and resources equivalent to millions of Earths—to simply ignore it would be unimaginably shortsighted. The Moon alone, for instance, has enough fusion fuel to provide totally clean...