Bill Simmon’s piece yesterday on NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and his hypocritical, dictatorial governing style got me thinking about the intersection of sports and politics. Much has been written (and spoken) about how the most American of sports leagues, the NFL, is definitively socialist. Goodell recently admitted as much on 60 minutes. Revenue (tickets, TV rights, merchandise) is shared between the [...]

When reading through some articles for a class, I came across this very interesting article.  Lily Tsai addresses questions of how village officials distribute resources to their constituents and what resources they should provide.  This starts with providing the villagers the ability to monitor and ultimately improve the government’s performance.  I have read in the past [...]

I have recently read two articles that explain the history and current status of the One-Child Policy and other birth control policies, one by Wang Feng and the other written for The New England Journal of Medicine.  These articles are very similar in terms of their presentation of the arguments as well as their evident [...]

Nearly a year ago, Apple faced the beginnings of a PR catastrophe. Wired magazine published an expose on Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturer that handles the final assembly of the iPhone and many other Apple products. Seventeen people had jumped to their death off the roof of their Shenzhen plant over the preceding few years, most blaming grueling working conditions [...]

A recent article in Slate by Nicola Davison describes a unique, emerging phenomenon in the Chinese gay community: fake-marriage markets. Men and women in China face an enormous amount of pressure to get married.  Family is a crucial part of Chinese culture. Parents expect a grandchild, and since most gay men and women in China [...]

China is beating us in everything. Growth in China over the past decade has been nothing short of astonishing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean China is going to become a gas-guzzling, resource-consuming monster that will bring the rest of the world down with it. In addition to the recent news claiming some parts of China [...]