Shanghai Baby

Winter’s last butterfly Saga and Beata have made another installment in the avant-gard series of seasonal poetry. Now it’s time for winter. Or rather, “Winter’s last butterfly.”  

Matthew, working at Pierson’s, a big publisher’s, got in touch and wanted to clear the copyright for a quote from A Blogger’s Manifesto that they want to include in forthcoming examination paper at GCE/GCSE level for students in Britain.  This is the quote: “There was never such a thing as freedom

I’m in the US! Giving talks on my new book — in Ann Arbor today, at NYU on Thursday and at Yale on Friday. Today and at NYU there will probably mainly be historians in the audience. It’s always a challenge talking to them. Not that I don’t feel confident

In addition to everything else, Saga is a very good poet. No, not poet in a teenage girl sense, but a real poet. Someone who can really see the world in a way that others don’t. And this is not just a proud father saying this — Saga just got

It was weird to be back at Yale after two decades. I lived in New Haven for five years but coming back it was like I visited for the first time. The entire campus has been gentrified, spruced up, country-club-ified. OK, it needed it badly, but now the entire feel

Universities all ultimately rely on the activities taking place among the invisible republic of scholars. The people who do the actual intellectual work — the hard-working researchers, the mad-cap thinkers, the people who approach all problems from a different angle. The actual institutional structure of the university is often in

                        That’s right! The right not to be poised by horrible air has made a gain in the last week. The Chinese authorities have started publishing detailed information regarding the air pollution in Shanghai. The Americans have done this

  Surely I cannot just leave China. Surely I have to get myself thrown out. It’s a matter of self-respect really. After all, if I could get into trouble at the London School of Economics for advocating freedom of speech, how difficult could it be to get into trouble for

When I picked up Rima, my youngest, after school today she asked me why my nose was all bloody. I felt with my hand and there was indeed blood dripping from my nose. Blowing my nose made the napkin all red. This is what air pollution in Shanghai is doing

The stupid Chinese censors have limited my access to the internet. Much of it I can’t access at all, including many Chinese websites, and email is very erratic. I can’t read articles and books online, no Wikipedia, and I can’t do my research. For some reason I can occasionally get