Welcome New Followers

Some of my favorite things I've done on line and Beijing observations

I’m in Beijing for the month, visiting my son who lives and works here. I’m deep in the writing and research on the book on Trauma Culture, but I am a very distractable person with many interests so for new followers I thought I would share some of the things I’m most proud of.

During the lockdowns, I went on Jacobin TV and did a segment on post-modernism — even though I’ve written about this topic before, I think the interview really makes accessible my criticism of that movement.

I also really like this piece I sketched out on Substack and then published at Damage about service industry heroics in A Gentleman in Moscow, The Menu and The Bear.

Last night, I took what I thought was an old yellow cab in Beijing back to my place pretty late at night. The driver was very apologetic because his battery had 6.9 km left on it and my place was 7 km away so he had to get a new battery if I didn’t mind. I asked him, you have to charge your battery right? He says no, he is going to change his empty battery for a new battery and it will take two minutes. I was like, what? What kind of car is this? No combustion engine? He says, no it’s an EO3. Chinese made all electric car.

It looks like one of the old yellow cabs I used to take Beijing in the Stone Ages. I had no idea that it was all electric. I said we don’t have this kind of technology in the U.S. He says, what, I thought America was much more advanced, more civilized.

I said people are more polite, that’s true. Especially in California where I’m from. I said we’re very nice, very polite, but then we all have guns, so there’s that and he couldn’t believe that people were allowed to have guns and that there were mass shootings all time. He was a pretty young guy. I think in the old days, the People’s Daily reported terrible news about the U.S. all the time, but now with social media, nobody reads the news.

As he promised, the battery was changed in two minutes and we sped off electrically, into the cold Beijing night.