Weekend Recommendations August 11.

More reads than A-V materials today.

You must have already noticed the rebranding of the place. I hope The Himalayan Gaze (THG) will last much longer.

What next after the saber-rattling around the Taiwan issue? Here are two insightful pieces:

Three Challenges of Xi by Italian sinologist Fransesco Sisci in Setimana news here. If this link does not open, then hope the piece will be carried by Asia Times soon, as it often does. The link worked earlier and I managed to read the long and insightful analysis.

Why China’s People No Longer Look Up to America by Wang Wen, a CCP member and former editorial person at Global Times. The surprise? The piece was carried by The New York Times. Also surprisingly, this piece seems to be much more restrained and accomodative than his usual Global Times columns.

On US politics, The Atlantic has one of the most articulate pieces on deteriorating polarization and the specter or violence: What Comes After the Search Warrant? by Tim Alberta.

Wondering where the world is going in the era of social media? Read this wonderful piece by Ezra Klein at the NYT: I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message

In Nepali, here is my latest piece on Nepal’s botched up transitional justice: नेपाल अर्को इन्डोनेसिया नबनोस्!. In this, I distill the findings from two films by Joshua Oppenheimer on Indonesia’s everlasting impunity for the perpetrators of 1965 genocide: The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence.

And in NewsGuff at Clubhouse, I started talking about Bill McGuire’s The Hothouse Earth today. Please join the 8:00 am NST show for follow-up talk about the climate issue in reference to the book.

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