This entire summer, NRK2, one of the state TV channels in Norway, have been broadcasting Bollywood movies every Friday night. To me, this was a real treat. Although I don’t enjoy every singly Bollywood movie (how could I, when they produce over 900 per year?), I seem to me more receptive to them than many [...]

Update: I removed the inline-link to the trailer, since it didn’t look nice in Windows browsers. Quicktime.
I came across this documentary on Yao Ming, the Chinese NBA player that has made, and found it quite interesting. I knew that Yao Ming was an important role model to Chinese in the US and in China who [...]

EastSouthWestNorth has long been among my favorite blogs about China, providing real insights into the media and internet world by posting long translations of newspaper articles, forum postings and the like. That’s where I got the story of Fu Rong, the mayor of Lingao in Hainan, who logged on to one of the most popular [...]

Update: I apologize for a) posting a broken link and b) taking so long to fix it. Thank you to those who pointed it out, and please try again, it’s worth it.
I just found out that the excellent documentary on the sit-in at Harvard, that I mentioned in the last post, is available online! I [...]

Ever since I discovered the Economist at my school in Italy, I thought it was a great source of news and analysis. At that time, I would mostly disagree virulently with all of their conclusions, but I recognized that they had the intellectual integrity to write what they felt the facts were. As I put [...]

I have written before about access to education, distance learning and so on. Today I idly flipped through the 300 channels of our kind host in Idyllwild, after having checked that the float we visited for the Rosebowl made it through the rain. After checking out a few news programmes, a Spanish talk shows and [...]

Two of my best friends are spending this Christmas in Chad, helping a local youth organisation use open source software (Linux) and donated hardware to produce a youth newspaper. Wojciech Gryc used to be my roommate the first year in Canada, and is annoyingly brilliant (just try to google his name), and Emanuele Fortin is [...]

I saw the documentary Mad Hot Ballroom with a Hospitality Club friend in Kansas City this summer. She herself was training to be a teacher, and I believe her mother was a teacher, so the movie had a particular salience for them. It is about a group of children in inner-city NYC schools that take [...]

On the bus to soil science, trying to repeat obscure soil horizons and cation exchance capacity, I started thinking about TV. Ever notice how fun it is to watch TV when you’re in a different country? Granted, you might not understand everything going on, but it’s just so refreshing to see all new faces, and [...]