continue on the theme of different "toilet cultures", I grew up using toilets without flush water and without cubicles. this is a widely circulated image showing an illustrated 007 book likely from the 1980s. the illustration is about James Bond retrieving a secret letter in a public restroom...

The anti-genocide protests are not made against the Jewish community. They're not even made against Israel per se. They are primarily against *our own government*, and it's complicity in the genocide being carried out by the Israeli state. The home secretary's remarks should be seen in that context.

"a motley association of self-described Classical Liberals, evangelists of free-market capitalism, ethnonationalists, atheists, and conservative theologians". journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Apple did something very similar to the people of Hong Kong in 2019, removing an app that allowed protesters to track police movements via crowdsourced information: gizmodo.com/apple-sells-...

LOL. AI's over-talkative tendency can be so funny. asked it to come up with some marketing blurbs. It gives suggestions - completely normal stuff. then gives "what to avoid": "this is the first and only book to ever tackle..." WHO in their right mind would say that.

thanks to the Rowling & Watson row I got myself involved in the trans debates on Douban and getting death threats as a result :)

my research identity is basically "a little more theoretical than empirical people and a little more empirical than theory people"

An outstanding interview. Patrick Iber of Dissent Magazine has interviewed the legendary Polish political scientist Adam Przeworski about de-democratisation in the USA, and what lessons he’s gleaned from Chile, Peru & beyond. Iber’s questions are stellar. Przeworski’s answers, chillingly candid.

sometimes it's intriguing to think about when things get politicized and when they *don't*. I used to work in Copenhagen uni (that's a decade ago), and almost all toilets in the uni are unisex. no one ever talked about it. maybe there was and my Danish wasn't good enough to get, but the fact

‘She didn’t realise how dangerous it was’: London-bound student held in China over Tibet support www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

#OtD 30 Sep 2014 Xu Lizhi, a poet and rural migrant who worked at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, died by suicide at the age of 24. Learn more about Xu and other Chinese migrant worker poets in our podcast: workingclasshistory.com/podcast/wcl-...

what a playful cover featuring examples of what participants told the AI to do in our ‘delegation to AI can increase dishonest behavior‘ article www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How should we understand Jin Xing, China’s most famous transgender celebrity? In this new essay, Yahia Ma unpacks her embrace of gender binarism not as a paradox, but as a strategy that secures mainstream visibility while opening space to imagine cultural and political otherness in China and beyond.

I am so sorry to hear the news. Jane Goodall has passed away, October 1, 2025. She just spoke in Taipei in June: "Young people are the future...we've been stealing their future for a very long time..So we've got to spend time with them and help them understand [that there] is a way forward."

Jane Goodall, ethologist and conservationist, has died. She was 91

one of the most overused cliche phrase in English writings on China? century of humiliation national humiliation or 国耻 is a keyword in Chinese discourse, as in 勿忘国耻 never forget national humiliation. but 百年国耻 is not frequently used at all. a CNKI search shows 12 articles, from all magazines,

like the "oppression Olympics", we're getting the "privilege Olympics". that's when accusing another person of being privileged loses any critical purchase, and weaponized by whom? literally the richest writer on earth with 14M followers on social media? columnist for one of the largest

have a forthcoming paper on people seeing dudes in dresses and immediately going "the fall of Roman empire" or the fall of random dynasty in Chinese history (never mind dudes back then were all in dresses)

it's crazy. there's a wave of backlash against China's new K visa meant to attract STEM graduates on social media. why? the same thing everywhere, fear of immigration, more specifically racism against Indians. influencers push conspiracist misinfo that claims Indians are studying the visa and that

apparently in Kitakyushu, Japan, the govt received lots of complaints about the provision of halal meals for Muslim students, and they clarified there was never such a plan. as far as I can find, only two EN language news sites reported about it. but it's all over Chinese news sites??

Together with 1000 Madleens to #Gaza @1kmadleenfr.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy we are sending a boat with international journalists & health workers in solidarity with Palestinian journalists & medics who continue to report & provide care through #genocide #BreakTheSiege #FreePalestine #AllEyesOnGaza

also got flashback to that scene Xi & Putin talked about organ transplants and immortality

90% is abt the US, the rest is Europe. There's little voices from the global south. The significance of X/Twitter in the history of the internet is it was once a platform for activists from the global south to get global attention for their movements/revolutions. BlueSky will never be that, but X

Random, but I’m still looking for stable employment (research/analysis/writing/teaching) and I’m happy to send along my CV in English/French. Job has to be in the UK, Canada or online.

I still think people are not talking enough about the fact that Curtis Yarvin calls himself Mencius

still very relevant today. I think the left's obsession with Schmitt post 9/11 prefigured both the decolonization talk on the part of the European New Right and the turn to 'civilizational order' on the part of some decolonials journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Great headline: “Newcastle protest: 100 anti-migrant protesters drowned out by counter march” www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2114...

even though I have an entire research programme on the kind of binary narrative exemplified by the post (China this "the west" that, I even have a forthcoming book on it), at this point I find it extremely boring. and social media is horrible. bc this kind of stuff guarantees virality.

Hey all, my article "The Imperial Gaze: Affective Governance, Hybrid Cartography, and China’s U-Shaped Line" is published in _Geopolitics_ today: it's OA, so please click and download, for free! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

have you been to a retail park? one of the most soul killing places humans ever built

Let that sink in "Despite its extreme population density, Gaza was mostly self-sufficient in vegetables and poultry, and met much of the population’s demand for olives, fruit and milk. But last month the UN reported that just 1.5% of its agricultural land now remains both accessible and undamaged."

Safe travels to Professor Jonathan Lear, whose words and thoughts transported so many of us. His radical hope remains.

Microsoft will no longer allow Israel to use its cloud services to enable its mass surveillance of occupied Palestinians – "the first known case of a US technology company withdrawing services provided to the Israeli military since the beginning of its war on Gaza"

Italy was on strike in solidarity with Palestinians last Monday. Hundreds of thousands demonstrated blocking roads, ports & railway stations. In Rome, many drivers found themselves stuck in traffic — & were happy about it, saluting demonstrators & condemning Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com The Trump administration’s autism project “is built on the premise that an autism diagnosis is a terrible tragedy and that scientists and doctors have failed,” Roy Grinker, a cultural anthropologist and the father of an autistic child, says. “But science has not failed.”

How do Dongbei crime dramas draw on Dongbei’s marginality to envisage alternative femininities? check out our new blog post by Min Xu: Sister in furs: female gangsters in northeastern Chinese crime dramas 穿貂皮的姐：东北悬疑剧里的女性黑帮形象 oddchinaout.wordpress.com/2025/08/21/h...

we are super excited to launch our student research blog Odd China Out. submissions bridging scholarly work with a wider audience, in English or bilingual, are welcome! oddchinaout.wordpress.com

“drones manufactured by the Chinese tech giant DJI have been used to attack hospitals and civilian shelters and to surveil Palestinian prisoners being forced to act as human shields”. DJI stopped sales to Russia & Ukraine, but did not stop selling to Israel www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/...

🚨🇪🇸 Breaking: Spain has dispatched a navy vessel to support the Global Sumud Flotilla heading to Gaza. Speaking from New York, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Spain “condemns the genocide” in Gaza and demanded Israel uphold international law and allow Spanish citizens to sail safely in the...

Lecturer/Snr Lecturer (Asst./Associate Professor) on the politics of China at SOAS www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOS640/l...

parenting an autistic child comes with enormous challenges and immense joy, and one thing I know for sure is I'll never stop fighting for a world that's fairer, kinder, and more just for people like him

the most important thing to remember when you see eugenicists who don’t believe that autistic people should exist rambling about “the autism epidemic” is not that they’re wrong about the “cause” (although they are absolutely wrong about it); it’s that they are eugenicists

reminding myself to delete account again. but, I want to say one good thing about this site. it's the people. sometimes people do leave a comment when they download your papers, and some of them are really nice 😭

Core to reactionary politics is a cowardly project that aims to protect and restore privilege and hierarchies of oppression Some thoughts on terminology and the term reactionary @reacpolrn.bsky.social reacpol.net/on-reactiona...

nationalist sentiments usually don't add up with economic reality but China is taking this to extremes. the 4 biggest trading partners are also the most hated countries in Chinese nationalism (one of them is not recog as a country, but like, trading heavily with someone you openly prepare to invade)

I wrote this piece on China’s bike share tech bubble back in 2018 and remain very proud of this piece. The imagery of piles of abandoned bikes, I think, is very representative of genAI as toys, and how they will always get abandoned because the novelty is greater than the utility.

at first it seems surprising that one of the co-authors is from a Party School 党校, but it isn't when you examine the content. you'd think the quotation marks around 'anti-fascist' signal critique? a nice example of "critical analysis" without critique grhas.centraluniteduniversity.de/index.php/pe...

"the lost boys of the west"

what's in today's doomscrolling news? Trump going after autistic people a UK MP's proposal for deporting hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants getting maximum coverage because everything he says always gets maximum coverage

“We’re talking about the sort of people who have attended the world’s top five universities or have won prestigious prizes,” you know what these are the people who'd be least worried about visa fees www.ft.com/content/3ba2...