Shelly Kraicer

This is amongst the most impactful two minutes of broadcasting I’ve ever seen.

By Emma Murphy, International Editor, ITV News. #Gaza

The milk tea alliance book cover

Finished reading @jwassers.bsky.social Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s short but important book THE MILK TEA ALLIANCE. We don’t see enough of these essential attempts to link protest and politics across countries (esp. in East & SE Asia) whose activists share ideas & gain strength from each other.

This was an excellent one! With just the right amount of self-reference :) Up there with my favourite series, the aliens who speak on their news broadcasts (with "salutations from the merchant case").

Thanks!

Don, do you know the schedule for remaining TIFF announcements? I seem to remember that Wavelengths comes last, is there anything else in between?

Of particular interest to me are:
- Taiwanese filmmaker/actress Shu Qi’s first film as director, GIRL (女孩);
- Cai Shangjun’s romance/drama THE SUN RISES ON US ALL (日掛中天) from Guangdong, China; and
- Mary Stephen’s autobiographical PALIMPSEST: THE STORY OF A NAME (France/HK/Taiwan).

No Passports, No Study Abroad: China Limits Public Employees’ Travel

The excerpt comes from a New York Times article on new restrictions on overseas travel for Chinese public servants. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/w...

This declaration by the CPC makes no sense. And I can’t even think of any way to make it make sense in any context: “People-to-people diplomacy exists because of the Party” Is it just a corollary to “everything exists because of the Party”? So, an assertion of totalizing ideology?

BR-KLASSIK | Das ARD-Nachtkonzert (I) Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: "Paulus", Ouvertüre (Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin: Marek Janowski); Vincent d’Indy: Fantasie über französische Volksthemen, op. 31 (Lajos Lencsés, Oboe; Rundfunk-Sinf...

www.br.de/radio/live/b...

In non-"mainland"-related fun, I'm smack right near the end of Mahler's 2nd Symphony on BR-Klassik (Berlin Phil + Rattle) & wow oh my it's huge. It just gets bigger, more expansive, more all-encompassing. Mahler's lack of "good taste" is essential to make this happen. Soaring above limits.

*"in tension" (sign)

So I like the suggestion of "Eastern China" above. Or just "east". But what if Tibetans are referring to Xi'an or Chengdu. They're "West" to China but "east" to speakers in the borderlands.

My Uyghur friends wanted me to use the "mainland" for non-Uyghur China, in a film's dialogue. But that sounds to my ears to be a bit too much intension with English usage.

I was struck by the Uyghur & Tibetan usage of "mainland": it maps most neatly onto English when spoken from HK and Taiwan. Island-to-mainland works.

And they can convey periphery-to-metropole meanings, either cautious or adversarial, depending again on context. So it's tough (impossible?) to map one set of carefully gauged ambiguities in 1 language onto a similarly fraught but differently weighted set of ambiguities in another.

I see. The problem is 内地, mainland, China mainland (uck), mainland China, inland... all have complicated political valencies when deployed by English and by China-based (and expatriate) speakers, and these meanings shift depending on who is speaking where.

Yes this one.

I wonder if Inner Mongolians have the same usage of 内地， since they're speaking from 内蒙. Probably doesn't work.

So I used "inland" as an adjective and "inland China", I guess (?) as a noun. Uyghurs or Tibetans saying "inland China" in dialogue still puts them in an ambiguous lingustic/political space (they could conceivably be in "outland China" which still implies "China", preserving safety).

I had to wrestle with this in subtitles. It's a similar usage for Tibetans when they refer to the rest of China as 内地. I like Prof. Milward's "eastern China" if you have the space. I ended up using "inland" (without "China") for a contemporary Tibetan film, as "I'm going to the inland school".

This iconic Fabian Todorovic cartoon is still one of the best I’ve seen at illustrating the remarkable amount of space we surrender to cars, leaving little space left for everyone and everything else. The text added later makes the bonus point that many drivers still manage to complain about it.

It’s Easy to Hate Traffic Cameras. But They Do Save Lives. They raise issues of fairness, and critics claim they’re only about revenue. More speed and red-light cameras, however, would prevent a lot of deaths and injuries.

Yes, traffic cameras work, but it's a myth that people hate them!

Survey after survey shows that most people support automatic enforcement (and often want more of it).

This is a false controversy, fed by a minority of disgruntled drivers & journalists seeking narratives with conflict.

Apparently *all* those lanes are required at every moment of every day along the lake. None of them can be lent to people using alternate modes of transportation. When Lakeshore (the southernmost road) was open to cyclists, pedestrians, and everyone else during the pandemic, it was FULL of people.

18 lanes for motorized vehicles between High Park and Lake Ontario. Toronto is mad.

Toronto failed here. Instead, we backslid & allowed cars to recolonize public space. I crossed from High Park to the lake today: counted *18 LANES* for cars & trucks on 3 parallel roads along the water. During the pandemic, a couple of those were returned to people walking and cycling. No longer.

Notable that these opinions, if expressed in a US (or even Canadian?) campus, will likely get you expelled (if you're a student) or fired (if your staff or faculty). But in Israel, they're expressible and passionately held (though by a minority of Israeli Jews).

Isreal needs nonviolent civil disobedience...

Victim identity Israel built ... now fuels its denial of genocide

Trump facilitated Netanyahu's Gaza starvation policy...

Gaza is on the brink of an exponential surge in starvation deaths

Headlines from the leading opposition Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz today. How many Israelis does this fighting newspaper still represent, though?

I asked ChatGPT to write a fictional obit for me, after seeing such things discussed here. It came out about 35% accurate, 35% exaggerated greatness, and 30% total fiction (it seems that fictional dead Shelly earned a degree in classical Chinese at Yale: would that that were true!).

Well, CCTV of course forbade all public access, closed the "open circuit", & turned their HQ into the virtually impregnable fortress that we all expect from major government buildings (and slapped a prominent, hideous helicopter pad onto the roof that OMA wasn't happy about, to say the least). 3/3

I remember the excitement around Koolhaas/OMA's CCTV Headquarters (the twisted open parallelogram, Beijing's most exciting contemporary big building), where OMA was proud to have also designed a "public circuit" through the powerful Chinese broadcasting fortress. 2/3

It is a fascinating video. I've gone by the building many times, on my way to the National Palace Museum. Next time I'm going in! Interesting that OMA (Rem Koolhaas) has incorporated a "public circuit" through the theatre complex. with free public access. 1/3