Reading Round-Up, 1/11/11

When a football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Minnesota Vikings was canceled in late December due to heavy snow in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell was not pleased. Calling the United States “a nation of wusses,” Rendell went on to say

The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.

At The China Track, Indiana University political science professor Scott Kennedy responds to Rendell’s comments, noting that “It is amazing how profound there has been a shift in the American consciousness about how powerful China has become.”



• At the Times Literary Supplement, China Beat consulting editor Kate Merkel-Hess reviews Yunte Huang’s Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History.

• And at Dissent magazine, consulting editor Jeff Wasserstrom and editor Maura Cunningham have a co-written article on “Interpreting Protest in Modern China” (subscription required):

When Americans on the Left—and in the Center and on the Right, for that matter—turn their attention to the issue of protest in contemporary China, they most often think back to the traumatic upheavals of 1989, which began with inspiring student-led demonstrations in April and May and ended with the June massacres. What they sometimes forget, though, is that many of the Chinese who contributed to the struggle and who suffered most in that year of miracles and tragedies were not students.

• We’ve previously featured an interview with Pallavi Aiyar about her new book, Chinese Whiskers — now read an excerpt from it at Danwei.

• When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg traveled to China last month, speculation abounded that he was negotiating the site’s entry into China. At his Forbes blog, Gady Epstein looks at the arguments for and against “Facebook.cn” and writes that in many ways, the decision has already been made:

Zuckerberg has already answered the question of whether Facebook will go to China with a question of his own: “How can you connect the whole world if you leave out 1.6 billion people?” That powerful notion — connecting the whole world — is what will trump arguments against a Facebook entry into China even in the eyes of many Western users.

1/11/11

Today marks a very special birthday for this little gal--just look at that date! We keep telling her a birth date like this won't happen to anyone again for over a hundred years. She thinks that's pretty awesome :) Oh my goodness time is passing far too quickly...

New England Patriots Links 1/11/11 - Patriots Tune Out Bluster From NY

I just try to coach my team. I'm not really worried about how everybody else coaches theirs. Everybody's got their own style and a lot of coaches do a great job. Rex does a great job with his team. I'm just trying to coach mine. I'm not really worried about what anybody else is doing. Is that the answer you're looking for?

Q: No, I'm looking for something a little more exclamatory, but we can wait and probably do that on Wednesday.

I get a ton of help from our coach. Of course we do. I think we have the best coach in the history of football. I think we’ve got a great offensive staff, a great defensive staff, ones that get all the players prepared. Coach talks about being a smart, tough, physical football team that plays well under pressure. Part of us being smart and prepared and ready to play is our coaches doing their homework.

We use whatever we can to get ready to play, and the guys that are on this team certainly buy into what our coaches teach us. Coach comes in every Wednesday morning — it will be Tuesday morning this week — and says, "These are the things we need to do to win," and he’s right damn near 100 percent of the time. If we can go out there and play that way this Sunday, then I think we’re all pretty confident that we’re going to play a great game. And if we play a great game, we’re going to be tough to beat.

We made the move the other day with Mike Wright, but there are a number of guys who have played a lot of football for us this year. Vince [Wilfork] has been out there. Gerard [Warren] has been out there. Myron [Pryor] has come back. It was good to have him for the last game and he had a chance to practice last week. Landon [Cohen]'s come in and made a contribution since he's been here.

We just work with the players that we have and just try to figure out the best way to utilize them on a week-to-week basis. The defensive staff does a great job with that and that'll be the case this week. So, it's been a combination of a number of different guys, some guys that don't have as much experience in our system relative to some other guys that do. And those guys, whatever they've been asked to do this season, they've stepped in. In whatever role they've been asked to play, they try to do that to the best of their ability, whoever they are. So, we'll continue with that approach here moving forward.