Scott Boehmer

Tag: China

  • This is How Universities Die

    If American universities remain the envy of the world in 2025, the question must be: for how long?

    William C. Kirby

    This is How Universities Die (Harvard Magazine)

  • Dumplings, History & Authenticity

    This article from University of Michigan’s LSA Magazine was an interesting read.

    Brown finds that when we look closely at the historic foodways that brought us popular dishes, we are “forced to consider that cuisines and cultures can’t be reduced to a single ethnic group.” Dumplings, for example, can be mapped all over the world, and she believes the first dumplings were likely made in Central Asia, or somewhere along the Silk Road, and not in the Chinese heartland.

    Gina Balibrera

    What Can the Dumpling Tell Us About the History of the World? (LSA Magazine)

  • The TikTok Ban Has Happened Before

    This is all to say that I’m of two minds about the legitimacy TikTok ban. China has cultivated a national surveillance apparatus so powerful and so efficient that it now exports city-scale surveillance packages to more than 52 nations around the world. Data inside a Chinese company is effectively also inside that national surveillance apparatus. So handing a live nationwide psychological profile on 150 million Americans to a Chinese-owned company is asking for trouble. But we also have shown such callous indifference to the privacy of Americans that specifically wringing our hands about TikTok while giving free rein to the rest of surveillance capitalism rings hollow to me.

    Jacob Ward

    The TikTok Ban Has Happened Before (The Rip Current)