The fact that Chinese stocks were climbing ever higher while the Chinese economy was cooling should have been an unmistakable warning of a bubble, but it caused surprisingly little concern. (Another reason to worry might have been the disparity in prices between so-called “A-shares”, which can only be purchased by investors inside China to keep […]
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Posted inNonfiction
Little Government in the Big Woods
Melissa Gilbert’s lost bid for Congress and the forgotten political history of ‘Little House on the Prairie.’
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Private Prison System for Immigrants
“You build a prison, and then you’ve got to find someone to put in them,” said Texas state Sen. John Whitmire, who has seen five of the 13 Criminal Alien Requirement (CAR) prisons built in his state. “So they widen the net and find additional undocumented folks to fill them up.” Most of the roughly […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Eight Stories About #HB2 and Its Ramifications on the Transgender Community
I hope the following eight stories will be of use to you, to educate my cisgender readers and provide support and solidarity to my transgender siblings.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
On Learning & Losing Language: A Reading List
Language shapes every facet of our lives—how we communicate, how we act, how we feel.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
In 1971, the People Didn’t Just March on Washington — They Shut It Down
The most influential large-scale political action of the ’60s was actually in 1971, and you’ve never heard of it. It was called the Mayday action, and it provides invaluable lessons for today.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Booze at Breakfast
The weisswurst frühstück Obama was enjoying is a beery Bavarian stalwart: boiled sausages with mustard, freshly baked pretzels and a cold weissbier, the operative word here being cold. Alcohol in the morning must be fresh and zippy. A bit of fizz, something dry, a hint of sweetness, a sharp kick – as drinks writer Henry Jeffreys puts […]
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
The Restless Ghosts of Baiersdorf
A small German town is haunted by its Jewish legacy and antisemitic past.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Olive Oil Trouble
Olive-oil fraud was already common in antiquity. Galen tells of unscrupulous oil merchants who mixed high-quality olive oil with cheaper substances like lard, and Apicius provides a recipe for turning cheap Spanish oil into prized oil from Istria using minced herbs and roots. The Greeks and the Romans used olive oil as food, soap, lotion, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Celebrating and Surviving in North Korea
Interviews with defectors also suggest that North Koreans are not serious consumers of marijuana. The drug of choice is, in fact, something much more pernicious: crystal meth. Meth, known colloquially as eoreum or bingdu (both mean “ice”, a name by which the drug is also known in the US) is a drug unfortunately suited to […]
