Excellent institutional news.

If you only read one social media post this week…

I kind of sympathize with this position. wsj.com/world/china/a-…

This has been all over Chinese social media since yesterday. There’s a cautionary tale in here about transplanting American academic structures and cultures into the administrative/bureaucratic realities of the Chinese academy. (It doesn’t seem like there were significant…

This is… welcome, I guess? Academic research datasets and economic datasets are still subject to strict constraints, though, so I won’t personally benefit much from any of this…

Sat through the first episode of Netflix’s Three Body Problem. It was… a difficult experience. The revisions just didn’t work for me, but maybe that’s because I’m too emotionally attached to the original, and therefore was never in a position to neutrally receive revisions of…

Omfg.

Who said Ivy League games can’t be insanely dramatic? espn.com/mens-college-b…

What are the odds that TikTok’s present is SHEIN and Temu’s future?

Highly recommended new book.

Weird academic experience of the day: was asked by a university press to review a book proposal—one of those “here’s how to solve the world’s problems” books—by a famous scholar, but also to do it on a *very* short deadline because they need to compete with other presses for the…

I would laugh if this entire thing weren’t so sad. And to everyone who confidently/vehemently claimed back then that this was all a set-up by the Chinese government, and that there was no substance whatsoever to the charges: you know who you are. theguardian.com/world/2023/dec…

Welcome to Chinese-style demographics! [An Only-Child Boom Is Beginning. It Gets Complicated When Mom and Dad Age. - WSJ] wsj.com/lifestyle/rela…