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Category Archives: China

Books on Cities: Tom Scocca, Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future

Monday, July 8, 2024

Tom Scocca has known difficult times of late. Earlier this year, he published an essay in New York magazine detailing his struggle with a fierce and mysterious — and, as of the piece’s writing, still unexplained — autoimmune disorder. This health crisis struck amid “some normal midlife stuff, some normal parent stuff, some abnormal and […]

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Times Literary Supplement: Michael Booth, “Three Tigers, One Mountain”

Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Were does Europe end and Asia begin? “If someone can pose as an expert on the country in question without knowledge of the relevant language, it’s part of Asia”, the American North Korea analyst Brian Reynolds Myers once quipped. Michael Booth doesn’t pose as an authority on the Koreas, or on the other countries in Three […]

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The Consummate Writer of Place: Christopher Rand in Los Angeles, China, and Beyond, 1943-1968

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

“LOS ANGELES may be the ultimate city of our age.” So begins the 20th century’s most unjustly forgotten book on Los Angeles, written by one of its most unjustly forgotten writers of place. Christopher Rand’s Los Angeles: The Ultimate City appeared in 1967, published by Oxford University Press and built upon a trilogy of articles TheNew Yorker ran in […]

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My profile of Peter Hessler, essayist of place in China, Colorado, and Cairo

Thursday, September 5, 2013

  From Los Angeles, California, which has become both my home and main subject, I connected with Peter Hessler in Cairo, Egypt, which has become both his home and main subject. He moved there with his wife, journalist Leslie T. Chang, and twin daughters after a stint living in and writing about southwestern Colorado, which […]

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