When asked by Chinese acquaintances if I enjoy Chinese food more than American cuisine I often reply, “I like Chinese food. The problem is, Chinese food does not like me!” I speak this truthfully. Few national cuisines can compare with the savor of Chinese cookery. Alas, what is pleasing to the tongue does not always […]
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe delivers the keynote address at the 2014 Shangri-La Dialogue Image Source This weekend I finally had the chance to sit down and read the collected transcripts of the 2014 Shangri-La Dialogue. This year’s round of the Dialogue has garnered much more media attention than usual. The coverage has focused on the […]
The side-bar of this blog declares that the Stage is a space to discuss “the intersections of governance, ecology, demographics, and culture.” [1] This casts a wide net–at times, too wide of a net. It would be much easier to maintain a blog devoted solely to exploring the ‘dynamics of human civilization,’ chronicling the decline […]
. . Several months ago I highlighted the work of Nate Thayer, one of the more accomplished investigative journalists of the post-Cold War era, here at the Stage. Some of Mr. Thayer’s most impressive work dates to the 1990s, when he was the Far Eastern and Economic Review‘s man on the ground in Cambodia. One […]
A Chinese coast guard ship fires a water cannon at a Vietnamese vessel.Image Credit: AP News (16 May 2014) Over the last two weeks remarkable things have happened in the South China Sea. I assume that the readers of The Stage have read the relevant news reports; I will not copy them here. At the […]
Image source. The Long Now Foundation, a society devoted to human flourishing on a millennial timescale, has started a project named the “Manual for Civilization.” The idea behind the Manual is not unlike that of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a seed bank built deep beneath the ice of a remote Norwegian island that […]
.. Over the last few days a fractious discussion about contemporary Thai politics has arisen over at Zenpundit, the premier space on this side of the blogosphere for discussions of strategic theory, history, political ideology, and the intersections between them. Yesterday Lynn Rees, a superb essayist who posts regularly at the site, entered the discussion […]
A great divide separates the worldviews of the average Chinese and American. The most profound description of this divide I have heard came from the mouth of a friend who has never been to America and who was not a historian nor accustomed to deep political reflection and debate. She concluded that Americans lived in […]
None of these five men are active bloggers or columnists. However, I have been impressed enough with their theories, general erudition, or the sheer scope of their work to set up a Google Alert [1] on each of their names, so that I am notified if they publish a new essay or are included in […]
“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be.” – Ecclesiastes 1:9 [1] Over the last few weeks the sections of the blogosphere which I frequent have been filled with predictions, advice, summaries of, and idle chatter about the situation in Ukraine and Crimea. I have refrained from commenting on these events for […]