10 stunning images from Liu Bolin, the disappearing manLiu Bolin’s images invite a game akin to Where’s Waldo?. In some of the Chinese artist’s incredible photos, it’s clear where he is standing; in others, like the one above, it’s much harder to spot the outline of his body at all. It’s for this that Bolin has been called “The Invisible Man.” In today’s […]
5 mnemonic devices for reading Chinese charactersTo an outsider, the Chinese language “seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China,” says ShaoLan Hsueh in today’s talk, given at TED2013. Hsueh’s mission over the past few years has been to break down that barrier, making reading and writing in Chinese accessible to people who didn’t grow up doing it. […]
TEDWeekends traces the origin of the All-American Chinese takeoutTurns out the fortune cookie that came with your chop suey isn’t actually Chinese … and neither is the chop suey. So where did they come from? In this TED Talk, journalist Jennifer 8. Lee shares the origins of some of America’s favorite “Chinese” food, and takes us on a culinary tour of Chinese restaurants […]
In Shanghai, China, where it’s always night, directly across the street from a pirated DVD shop called Movie Star is another pirated DVD shop called Better Than Movie Star … and that’s where TED’s founding video director, Jason Wishnow, discovered this pirated DVD (which: sigh! but it’s too good not to share). It’s a bootleg […]
Meet two Chinese factory workers, Lu Qingmin and Wu ChunmingIt’s hard not to get a lump in your throat when you read about the grueling conditions in Chinese factories. It’s hard not to feel guilt about those working 70 hours a week in Foxconn factories where iPhones and iPads are assembled, or to feel shocked at revelations that workers in toy factories regularly receive fines […]
Did China hack the Dalai Lama’s email? How a human-computer collaboration traced the clues“Man versus machine” is not an idea that Shyam Sankar believes in. In today’s fascinating talk, given at TEDGlobal 2012, Sankar urged us to think about how human ingenuity can combine with computers’ ability to parse data to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. His point: Technology should make use of human creativity, […]
8 extremely popular Chinese internet memesWhen it comes to the internet, the Chinese government may have taken inspiration from the Great Wall of China and created the largest digital boundary in the world, blocking 500 million users from accessing the global-standard social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. But blogger Michael Anti, whose real name is Jing Zhao, explains in […]
China’s censorship battle between the cats and the mice: Michael Anti at TEDGlobal 2012A sick brick “I want to make my friends understand: China is too complicated,” begins Michael Anti. “You can’t tell a one-size story.” According to some, China is a brick, helping the world economy. According to others, it’s a sick country, with no access to Facebook. (The second phrase was as claimed in the Facebook […]
Listening to China’s workers: Leslie T. Chang at TEDGlobal2012Think about the things you use every day — and about the people who make them. Leslie Chang is a journalist who has spent years in China to talk to the workers who make the products we use, voices that have been missing from much of the discussion about labor, global markets and exploitation. “This […]
If you are planning (you should) to go see Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary "Manufactured landscapes", which opened last week in theaters across the US after spending a year mesmerizing film festivals audiences and will soon arrive in Europe, make sure you get there in time, for nothing describes the scale and essence of today’s globalized industry […]
In an extended run at the Film Forum in New York City (and now playing in Philadelphia), the film Manufactured Landscapes is in the spirit of Edward Burtynsky’s 2005 TED Prize wishes: to show the world the size, the devastation, the sheer astonishingness of the industrial landscapes we have created — and to create a […]
