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 Chinese custody. American officials expressed “concern” that ASDS might be spreading to American detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It's like the bird flu,” said one source. “First China, and then the rest of the world!”

2. While poking around for images, I came across this “Adopt a Chinese blog” campaign from 2005. The wiki page seems to have been updated more recently. Should we adopt a blog on Printculture? There are so many deserving blogs out there in China, it seems almost a shame to have one's own...

3. I thought J Lee's piece yesterday was incredibly interesting, partly for the glimpse into a social world that is totally not my own, but mostly because it made me think a lot about how different things are when you know you're going to be leaving a place. I have moved a lot in my life, and the period of time between when you know you're leaving and when you actually go is such a strange one. The liberating part of it is that one doesn't feel pressured to engage in the social in the same ways — you really do feel liberated, in what is ultimately almost a sociopathic way, from the constraints of permanence. I tend in these situations to withdraw a bit — to reduce, however slightly, my efforts at connection and interaction. Which suggests that this is how I'd rather be all the time.

4. On office space, via H Saussy on Monday: I'm one of those academics who actually uses my office a lot, with the result that I tend to make it fairly cosy. At some point I realized that I spend more hours in my office than in any other room except the bedroom (and most of that not sleepng!!! Yeehaw!! ... sorry) and that it made sense that I should like it there. Since the office is also, however, a public space, it has a communicative function that the bedroom does not (except when I'm on video!!! Kapow!!!), which means that it's a strange melding of the personal (and the comfy) and the professional. Some academics bring their dogs to the office: this strikes me as simultaneously great and vaguely wrong.

5. The end of blogging. Here's a fairly short farewell to blogging from a contributor to a science blog. The short version: blogging was getting in the way of my work. This was also Michael Berube's rationale for shutting down his blog. My friend Charlie, on the other hand, says that blogging helps him work, and once said to me that my writing had clearly improved (either in terms of quality or speed, I can't remember which) as a result of my blogging. I don't feel this to be true, though it may be true anyway. I mostly experience writing for Printculture as an interruption, though it may be possible that writing this way has actually made it easier for me to write.

Part of this difference has to do with how Printculture felt in the early days, when we were writing every week and I had a ton of stuff piled up that I just wanted to get off my chest. Now, when much of that has been said, the deadline (every two weeks) occasionally creeps up on me and I think, oh, no, what the hell am I going to write about this time? It's a strange blog — I don't really know of anything like it on the internets. And I'm glad that it's strange, because part of what we wanted to do was to have a blog that wasn't like anything else that was out there. But it's strange how draining a commitment it is sometimes — if you asked me “how hard is it to write 1,000 words every two weeks on a topic of your choosing?” I'd say, “not that hard,” but it turns out that a lot of the time it feels quite hard.

This is not an announcement of any kind. But it may be an invitation to the other Printculture bloggers (or the other bloggers who read us) to start a conversation about the work that this is, about the pleasures and difficulties of it, and about what it means to continue to publish in a medium when in fact you are committed to resisting some of its major strengths.