There is a memorable scene in the film Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson, 1976), in which Logan 5 (Michael York), in his jovial state of idleness, teleports a series of potential female partners from the community-run circuit (meat market). When a woman of his fancy is finally beamed into his apartment (whose name is revealed later on in the film as Jessica 6 (Jenny Agutter)), Logan welcomes her with open arms, “Let’s have sex!”

The Beijing Olympics has been a media and publicity success thus far; but what is missing from this picture of global harmony?

Daniel Gordon’s A State of Mind (2004) takes viewers inside North Korea through portraits of two young girls, Hyon Sun and Song Yon, as they train for the national Mass Games. All the publicity for and reviews of the film speak of the unprecedented access Gordon was given, enabled by the success of his previous film, The Game of Their Lives (2002), about the North Korean team that made it to the 1966 World Cup quarterfinals.

A rare victory for the forces of good over the last two weeks: faced with the refusal of South African cargo unions to unload a shipload of weapons destined for Zimbabwe, the People's Republic of China has (apparently) decided to bring the ship back home. The heroism of the dock workers and their union, the South African Transport Workers Union, is a stirring reminder of the possibilities of nonviolent resistance to evil.

A few small things today, just some ideas I've come across or thought this week, but none of them quite large enough to become its own entry. 1. “A Chinese judge charged with corruption died in his cell from ”adult sudden death syndrome“, Xinhua news agency said today.” This is the first line in a real story in a real newspaper. Apparently “ASDS” has been known to strike a variety of prisoners held in Chines...

Now showing in New York, though not for long: The First Emperor, an opera written, scored, and directed by the Chinese Gesamtkunstwerk all-stars Ha Jin, Tan Dun, and Zhang Yimou. Designed--like Tan Dun's music more generally--to be the first major merging of Chinese and Italian operatic styles, The First Emperor is both a cultural and political document of its times, a reflection of the rising power of China's cultural emigrant class and, in t...

In a famous scene in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 classic To Be or Not to Be (about a Polish acting troop during the period of Nazi occupation), the director of the embedded play (“Gestapo”) complains that the actor playing Hitler does not resemble the Fuehrer, and instead is “just a man with a little moustache.” The director, casting about for a model to illustrate what he is looking for, sees a photograph on the wall and exclaims, “That...

On our way home from Beijing yesterday my girlfriend picked up a fashion magazine at a street stand to peruse on the bus ride back to Tianjin. As I glanced at the cover of the magazine what struck me were the two words “Party Queen” there amidst the rest of the Chinese. Even the name of Jennifer Lopez, who found here way onto the cover and into the magazine, was in Chinese while these two words were the only English to be found. ...

Last week I watched two new televisual accounts of the New China: “China Rises,” on the Times-Discovery channel, and “The Tank Man,” an edition of the PBS series Frontline. (“The Tank Man” is an hour long, without commercials, “China Rises” four, with them). Discovery-Times was a channel I didn’t know I had –a sort of joint production of The New York Times and the various Discovery channels. The title of their program is telling: “China Rises...

The dawn of the era of human rights in the West corresponds almost exactly with the dawn of the era of criticizing other people for not respecting human rights. It also corresponds, rather sadly, with the era of saying that certain people can't be granted human rights because they're too uncivilized. For instance: in the early 1800s most European countries were outlawing torture (the first really popular criticisms of torture appear in the mi...

Whatever happened to the American love affair with France? In an interesting article from 2003, Brookings fellow Justin Vaisse tackled the question. The short answer is that when Chirac opposed the invasion of Iraq, Fox News threw a switch marked Hate.

Following up on my promise last week to keep moving towards a grand unified theory of contemporary China (which I am of course unqualified to produce), here are a few more thoughts for the mixer: 1. Obviously, things are changing very fast there, as the entire country girds itself for the 2008 Olympics. Around Beijing and Tianjin, where most of the events will take place, these changes are radically altering public space. Their major effect is...

I'm writing this from China, where web access has been spotty at best, a combination of weird hotels and smoky internet cafes making it far less pleasant than usual to spend time online. And so alas, dear printculture readers, the best I can do this week (and more than likely next) is a few scattered ideas. But I promise the definitive statement on today's China, in which I'll bring together the complexities of the global economy, the movement...

An article in the New York Times this week reported on the recent linguistic history of the former Yugoslavia, where what were formerly known as regional accents or dialects are now being taught in the school as formal languages, largely as an attempt to ground ethnic or national identity. This includes the production of new textbooks: The authors of the new textbooks say such responses show how the region's culture has been splintered along...

Consider these sentences from "The Ends of Theory: The Beijing Symposium on Critical Inquiry," which appeared in Critical Inquiry's winter 2005 issue: This is not to say that great theoretical breakthroughs and heroic new ideas were circulating at the Beijing confernece. Something more modest was occurring, a subtle reformulating of literary and cultural canons, a dislocating of familiar questions and methods, a 'medium theory' that stress th...