[Adam Minter] Chinese populism lives in a video app

Yang Yang, a 22-year-old Chinese corn farmer, spends two to three hours per day streaming video of life in his cliffside village to smartphones across China. He spends lots of time clinging to a cliffside ladder, one hand on his selfie stick, while he banters with fans about village life.It’s hardly riveting television, but in China it has an audience: In just two months, Yang has managed to earn more than 1 million views and 45,000 regular followers on Kuaishou, an online video app favored by t

Dec. 29, 2017

[Noah Smith] A road map for reviving the Midwest

John Austin is a man with a mission: to revive the Rust Belt. The former president of the Michigan State Board of Education, he is also a researcher at the Brookings Institution and has been the director of multiple nonprofit organizations and government commissions. In 2006 he produced a plan for Rust Belt regional revitalization. Now, in a series of blog posts for Brookings, Austin has been evaluating which local development strategies have worked, and which have failed.　Austin believes that t

Dec. 28, 2017

[Los Angeles Times] Talking about climate change in Orwellian doublespeak doesn’t make it go away

If President Donald Trump were a reader of books, we’d recommend a nearly 70-year-old novel to him, because it illustrates nicely both the absurdity and danger of perverting language for political ends. The book is George Orwell’s “1984,” which gave us the concept of “Newspeak,” a language invented by government, and of ministries that do the exact opposite of what their names imply, i.e., a Ministry of Peace that is in charge of waging permanent war, and a Ministry of Truth churning out lies.　T

Dec. 27, 2017

[Mac Margolis] President’s narrow survival is good news for Peru

Given the notoriously glacial pace of Latin American justice, Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s fall from grace and, almost, from power was dizzying. Barely a week after being accused of lying about taking money from a tainted contractor, he was hauled before congress and narrowly escaped impeachment late Thursday -- an inquisitorial zeal that might make the old school generalissimos look slack.　Kuczynski’s survival is good news for Peru, which thanks to its sensible policies and market

Dec. 27, 2017

[Christopher Balding] China bets on more state control for 2018

As 2017 wraps up and 2018 beckons, it‘s worth reviewing what we forecast for China in the year now ending, and to cast ahead for what themes might play out over the next 12 months. After this week’s meeting of Communist Party leaders at the Central Economic Work Conference, we can expect their targets and objectives for 2018. And these meetings have great import: It was the 2015 meeting that started the ongoing “supply-side reform” campaign.Last year we focused on a couple of points. First, watc

Dec. 27, 2017

[Jago Russell and Christophe Deloire] Has Interpol become a tool of oppression?

Arrests of journalists in Spain and Ukraine on the basis of Interpol notices have raised serious questions about the methods of the international police agency. For media professionals in particular, the trends are deeply worrying.The cases in Spain and Ukraine are not isolated incidents. Countries opposed to a free press are increasingly using Interpol’s “wanted person” alerts to target and silence journalists who have fled. Since July, Fair Trials and Reporters Without Borders have responded t

Dec. 26, 2017

[Noah Smith] Suddenly, America’s trade deficit isn’t so awful

It’s possible that more than half of the US’ trade deficit is a mirage -- an artifact of corporate shenanigans designed to avoid taxes.　Official statistics say that the US trade deficit is about 3 percent of gross domestic product -- smaller than in the 2000s, but still historically large.But a recent Goldman Sachs note about tax reform makes the startling claim that the real trade deficit is much smaller -- less than 1.5 percent. If this claim is right, the trade deficit has shrunk by more than

Dec. 26, 2017

[John Yoo, Saikrishna Prakash] Trump’s great power has its limits

Our 18th-century constitution causes confusion in the 21st century by granting the president great power but also demanding great accountability. US President Donald Trump’s defenders believe his authority forges an impenetrable shield that deflects criminal charges. His critics find wrongdoing in every presidential action, order or tweet, especially on law enforcement. Both camps are mistaken.　The framers established an executive more formidable than many 18th-century monarchs. As James Madison

Dec. 26, 2017

[Nicole Brodeur] ‘Feminism’ is the word of the year. Should we be celebrating?

In the days since the Merriam-Webster dictionary named “feminism” the word of the year, I haven’t been sure whether to celebrate, or scream.　It’s great to see that the word was the most-searched on Merriam-Webster’s website, and that look-ups for the definition increased by 70 percent over last year.　That means people are curious, that they want to learn. They want to be sure that the term isn’t so much a salvo as a sensibility.　But it also feels as if people are just now realizing the need to s

Dec. 25, 2017

[Markos Kounalakis] Christmas comes early for Russia’s Putin

Christmas came a little early for Vladimir Putin this year. Russia usually celebrates the holiday on Jan. 7, but President Putin’s present arrived a month early when he announced his intention to remain in office via a national voting process. He has unofficially already won.　“Election” formalities are scheduled for March 18, 2018, and the legitimizing process will cost $300 million. The leading opposition candidates are already dead or disqualified. The handful of colorful and credible also-ran

Dec. 25, 2017