We’ve heard it before, in essays that go viral, in late-night YouTube spirals, in Instagram quotes scrawled over stormy mountain vistas: “Comfort is the enemy.” The modern life, we’re told, is too padded, too sanitized, too safe. Our climate-controlled rooms, our same-day deliveries, our curated playlists — all lull us into spiritual numbness. A life too easy, they say, dulls the soul. They’re...
In the Chinese-speaking world, sentences often end before they are truly finished. And yet, listeners understand. That’s the efficiency of language—and the subtlety of power. “You shouldn’t do that.”“Be considerate of your parents.”No explanation needed, no room for reply. Beneath such phrases lies an entire apparatus of discipline: a structure that defines what is proper, normal...
Every now and then, the internet confuses itself with a court. Then a bonfire. Then a battlefield. This past week, a sordid affair involving a Chinese hospital doctor and a trainee lit up the nation’s social media. What should have been a localized scandal—a doctor cheating, allegedly abandoning a patient mid-anesthesia—swiftly metastasized into a nationwide referendum on medical training...
Grief makes us illegible to others. And sometimes, in trying to survive it, we make ourselves illegible on purpose. In her recent essay in The New Yorker, “The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons,” Yiyun Li writes about the unimaginable: losing both her sons, six years apart, each by suicide. The prose is restrained, sparse to the point of frictionless. There are no crescendos of pain, no indulgence in...
David Brooks has written an eloquent, bruised elegy for a conservatism he once believed in—a conservatism that, in his telling, began with Burkean virtue and ended in MAGA nihilism. He mourns a country that no longer believes in the moral underpinnings of democracy, in the quiet dignity of public service, in the slow work of civic knitting. He describes a nation ravaged by the acid of Trumpism...
In its April 17 feature, Xinhua News Agency unveiled what it framed as a monumental stride: the solidification of “Cultural China”—a term now woven tightly into the fabric of contemporary Chinese statecraft. The article, brimming with celebratory metrics and proclamations of global recognition, extolled China’s cultural industries, public services, and international outreach. On...
The United Kingdom is no longer one nation under a faded flag. It is a kaleidoscope mid-shatter—its colors spinning, its structure cracking, its politics in open revolt against itself. Labour is shapeshifting into a cautious centrist hydra, the Tories are cannibalizing themselves like a snake confused by its own tail, and the Liberal Democrats are caught in an existential séance, trying to summon...