{"id":5874,"date":"2024-07-08T23:30:08","date_gmt":"2024-07-09T06:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5874"},"modified":"2024-07-08T23:30:08","modified_gmt":"2024-07-09T06:30:08","slug":"books-on-cities-tom-scocca-beijing-welcomes-you-unveiling-the-capital-city-of-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5874","title":{"rendered":"Books on Cities: Tom Scocca, Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"<\/center><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Tom Scocca has known difficult times of late. Earlier this year, he published an essay in <\/a>New York <\/a><\/em>magazine<\/a> detailing his struggle with a fierce and mysterious \u2014 and, as of the piece’s writing, still unexplained \u2014 autoimmune disorder. This health crisis struck amid “some normal midlife stuff, some normal parent stuff, some abnormal and menacing stuff that I truly can\u2019t even get into,” but also as the effects of the professional apocalypse in the journalism industry reached his own career. “I gambled on a job I wanted, as the editor-in-chief of a small magazine, and it ran out of funding.” (This seems to have been a short-lived, garishly designed, murkily blockchain-driven venture called Popula<\/a>.) Another position was not forthcoming: “abruptly, all that my connections could offer were gigs.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite only ever having had gigs, I’ve felt some of this myself; over the past six months or so, for reasons I still don’t understand, it’s become awfully hard to get a reply out of any editor. Being a dozen or so years younger than Scocca, without a family to support or a body suddenly bent on dissolving itself, this hasn’t put me into a much worse position than usual. Regardless, I can’t help but pay more attention to what I do have in common with him, especially when I consider where he was back in the mid-two-thousands. I mean that not in the sense of where he was in his career, exactly, but where he was in the world: Asia, and more specifically China, gathering the experiences that would go into his first (and, to date, only) book, Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at Substack<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2014 and, as of the piece’s writing, still unexplained \u2014 autoimmune disorder. This health crisis struck amid “some normal midlife stuff, some normal parent stuff, some abnormal and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112,13,101,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beijing","category-books","category-books-on-cities","category-china"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5874"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5876,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5874\/revisions\/5876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}