Taiwan's First Day of Legal Same-Sex Marriage: Registrations, Celebrations, Opposition, Banquets and Reflection
This road of struggle is far from over. On the contrary, it is only the starting point.
QDaily in English
2310 completed translations from the archive. Articles retain their original publication dates.
What Is Unique to Western History, and What Might Be Called Its Formula?
*Metamorphoses of the City* is the summit and the summing-up of Pierre Manent's three decades of thinking about modern politics. Following the Western political form as it changes from the Greek city to the nation-state, and on into our increasingly post-national world, he asks searching questions about the future of self-government. A beautifully conceived, deeply unsettling book. — Mark Lilla (American political scientist, professor at Columbia University)
The North Face Wants to Be "Cool." What Will It Use to Conquer Young People's Vanity? | Market Inventors
Having become the favorite of dads in the city, they naturally want the youth market too.
Xu Zhiyuan Launches Young Reformer: He Wants One Man to Show a Whole Era
"Do you know why I wanted to write three volumes? I just wanted to prove I'm not an internet celebrity."
How One Eclipse Photograph Confirmed Relativity — and Pushed Humanity Toward Nihilism
The world's most famous total solar eclipse happened a hundred years ago, on May 29, 1919.
The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living
QDaily's editor-in-chief picks the best of the week.
From Huawei to the European Parliament Elections: How Does Photography Bring the Public Closer to the Headlines?
"Art and Exhibitions" is a new QDaily column, updated weekly. We try to use an independent eye to show the art world as it really is — real, interesting, and sometimes not especially likable.
How the Nazis Made the Jews Everyone's Enemy — and Manipulated Public Opinion
In an era when antisemitism and conspiracy theories still shape world politics, Jeffrey Herf offers both a timely warning of their danger and a vivid account of the paranoid fanaticism that formed the ideological foundation of Nazi Germany. — Citation, National Jewish Book Award
Twenty Years of Bluetooth Fell Short of Its Promise — Failed Communication Technologies Tend to Fail the Same Way | QDaily Business History
The communication technology on every phone that almost nobody actually uses
How Rothbard, a Leading Voice of the Austrian School, Defended Human Freedom
Even if you have never heard of Rothbard, his life, his ideas, and his spirit will pull you in... This neglected book recreates the intellectual history of the postwar years while telling the story of what Rothbard contributed. The author watched Rothbard's thinking evolve at first hand from the 1970s onward, and to read the book is to stand in the middle of those exhilarating arguments. —
So What Is "EQ," Anyway? | 100 Big Questions About Life
If we still think of EQ as a virtue, then perhaps it is best understood as a kind of control — only the target of that control isn't other people, it's yourself.
Mrs. Ludwig von Mises's Memoir Takes You Inside His Life and Mind
This book will answer no economic questions and offer no academic wisdom. What it sets out to answer are the many personal questions about my husband, Ludwig von Mises. —Margit
Philosopher Zhou Lian: All My Thinking Revolves Around "How Should a Person Live?" | Interviews
"If cynicism and self-centeredness have become incurable, we will ask, as Kant did: what value is there in human beings living on this earth?"
Good-looking packaging is everywhere. This British design firm is better at packaging that sells.
After 26 years in design, Pearlfisher's founder explains how he draws on today's most fashionable lifestyles to help clients remake themselves and find new business.
How Small Mistakes Build Into Disasters — and How Small Steps Can Prevent Them
"Over the past few decades, our understanding of complexity, organizational behavior, and cognitive psychology has opened a window onto how small mistakes build, step by step, into major disasters. We now understand not only how these accidents happen, but also how small steps can prevent them."
How Did a Gay Magazine Speak for Its Community in Anti-Gay 1950s America? | Stonewall at 50
There was some luck in the outcome, of course, but it played an important part in the development of the LGBT community.
A Swedish Game Studio Decided to Leave Sony — What Happened Before and After?
This is the third piece in our series on Swedish games.
Baidu's Ad Business Is in Crisis, But the Problem Isn't Just Baidu — Or Just Advertising
One company's ad revenue is another company's marketing budget. How advertising does says a lot about the wider economy.
Nishikawaguchi, the Japanese Town Packed With Chinese Restaurants: A Shanghai Snack-Shop Owner's Story, Part 2
Welcome to "Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round," a QDaily column by the Japanese Chinese-language writer Yoshii Shinobu. A "second round," or nijikai, is the optional second gathering office workers move on to after the drinks at the first bar — the stretch of the evening where the talk loosens up.
From the Studio Apartment to the Historic House: Kengo Kuma on the Ten Kinds of Japanese Home
The title of *A Theory of Ten Houses* (《十宅论》) plays on *A Theory of the House* (《住宅论》), the book that made the home sacred; its contents pay tribute to Marcus Vitruvius's *The Ten Books on Architecture*. It is not only a book about architecture. Through architecture it sets out a Japanese system of signs, one that puts great weight on context, and the symbolic meanings behind it.
Wang Keping, 70, Has Carved Wood for 40 Years — the Piece That Caused a Sensation Came in 1979 | Remembering the Stars Art Exhibition, Part 3
We interviewed five people who lived through the Stars Art Exhibition. Their stories carry the marks of their era, and each is deeply personal.
50 Years Photographing Different Social Groups: What Did She Capture?
American photographer Susan Meiselas has won the 2019 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Her subjects run from war to human rights, from cultural identity to the sex industry.
They Teach Swing Dance, Just to Give People a Simple Kind of Happiness | Great Little Studios
Dance makes shy, guarded people easier in their own bodies, and more relaxed — as if it lets another side of them show.
Five Czechs, 30 Years Later, on What It Felt Like to Return to Europe
No one seems to talk about "Europe" more than Eastern Europeans do. For them, Europe is a question.
Time Makes Art, Destroys It, and Finds It Again
"Art and Exhibitions" is a new QDaily column, updated weekly. We try to use an independent perspective to show the art world as it really is — real, interesting, and sometimes not entirely likable.
TV Shopping Upgraded Into Internet-Celebrity Livestreaming. What Else Changed?
E-commerce livestreaming started with "internet celebrities," but the internet celebrity is no longer what it once was.
From the American Revolution to the Civil War, How Did Slavery Drive the Growth of Capitalism?
This book gives the fullest and most powerful account of how slavery changed between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Baptist's telling is eloquent, humane, and impassioned; anyone studying American slavery needs it. — Edward Ayers, president of the University of Richmond and winner of the Bancroft Prize
Huang Rui, 66, Worker, Founder of the First "Stars" Art Exhibition | Memoirs of the "Stars" Art Exhibition, Part 2
We interviewed five people who lived through the "Stars" Art Exhibition. Their stories carry the marks of their era, and each is deeply personal.
10 Families, 17 Species: A Book About the Extraordinary Lives of Ordinary Trees
An impassioned, loving letter to trees, which stresses the long history of how we and trees have shaped each other, from the past to the present … Trees live in extremely fragile conditions, and the book warns that we should stop ignoring the problem. — Clare Hickman, BBC *History Magazine*
A Riot in a New York Bar 50 Years Ago, and America's Fight for Gay Equality | Stonewall at 50
In a series of articles, we examine — from social, cultural, and other angles — how the Stonewall riots became possible.
Nishi Kawaguchi, Japan's Cluster of Chinese Restaurants: Four Owners, Four Pasts (Part One)
Welcome to "Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round," a QDaily column by the Japanese Chinese-language writer Yoshii Shinobu. A nijikai, or "second round," is the gathering Japanese office workers move on to after the first bar closes — optional, looser, and where people really talk.
Jürgen Habermas on European Integration: Which Europe Do We Want?
"Which Europe do we want? The question is hard to answer satisfactorily in the constitutional dimension alone, because the traditional concepts of the state (and of international law) cannot grasp it."
This Classicist Exposes the Cultural Structures That Keep Women Out of Power
"You can't just slot women into a structure already coded as male — you have to change the structure itself."
Liao Weitang on Writing as a Career and How He Sees It Today | The Study
Right now, the biggest responsibility for people like us is to keep speaking up, not to stay silent. And if you can't even manage that, you should at least hold the line on one thing: refusing to lie.
Twenty Years Into the Fake Digital Economy, Internet Companies Depend More on Offline Business — and Carry More of Its Costs
It used to be "clicks and mortar." Now the mortar keeps getting heavier — letting tech companies remake traditional industries, but also saddling them with the mortar's costs.
Ten Years of Pent-Up Impulse to Express Finally Broke Free | Memories of the "Stars" Art Exhibition, Part 1
This isn't just a story from the art world — it's a marker of an era.
Historian Tonio Andrade Tries to Understand, Through the Lens of War, Why Modern China Fell Behind the West | Interviews
China today is in a "Song dynasty Warring States era" — wars aren't as frequent as in the real Warring States period, but the Song coexisted with its neighbors in a state of lasting tension, locked into geopolitical rivalry for the long haul.
Who "Interferes" With Art? Is There Even Such a Thing as Interference in Art?
"Art & Exhibitions" is a new weekly column from QDaily. We're trying to show the art world as it really is — genuine, entertaining, and sometimes not entirely likable — from an independent point of view.
Chinese Banks Are Finally Taking Retail Banking Seriously. Is It Too Late?
The market has already been handed over to the internet companies.
How Sweden's Tiniest University Built a Game-Development System That Shaped the World
"We're not exactly a famous city, and that probably confuses people — how did a place like this end up building such an innovative, tightly knit community? Maybe it can't be copied elsewhere, but we're happy to share how we did it."
Le Corbusier's Poems and Paintings Reveal the Foundation of His Character
"In it, I set down the categories of thought that daily life rarely lets us express. These things are not only the foundation of my work in architecture and painting — they are the foundation of my character. The work falls into seven parts: Environment, Mind, Flesh, Fusion, Character, Offering, Tool."
A Hundred Ways to Photograph Food, All Found by Mining Its Talent for Acting | Great Little Studios
"Food has its own temperament!"
Ticket Price Aside, Budget Airlines and Legacy Carriers Aren't Even the Same Business
Compared with Air China and China Eastern, whose fortunes swing wildly with the economy, budget carriers like Spring Airlines behave more like taxi companies.
Xu Zhiyuan Spent Five Years Writing a Biography of Liang Qichao — Volume One, Young Reformer, Is Out
Xu Zhiyuan read the historical record to feel his way into the emotional register of the era, used imagination to reconstruct the texture of life in that society, and empathized his way back into Liang Qichao's life — writing, in something like Liang's own style, prose that "always carries feeling." The result is a portrait of Liang Qichao and his age, and of a turbulent, treacherous stretch of Chinese history. — Ge Zhaoguang (Distinguished Professor, Fudan University)
A Photography Exhibition on the Arctic, Antarctic, and Equatorial Coral Sea Wants to Wake You Up to Climate Change
We also spoke with three polar photographers about underwater photography, working with wildlife, and what it's like shooting at the poles.
What Is Missing From Our Understanding of Cities, and What Actually Drives Prosperity? | Urban Issues Reading Notes (Part 3)
This is a books column, and what follows recommends several books about cities and gentrification. The reading notes run long; this is the final installment.
"How Do We Break Free From Fixed Bodies and a Fixed Society?" One Artist Answers With an AI Performance
He fuses performance with artificial intelligence, hoping to challenge what we think of as "normal."
An Exhibition Hard to Define: More Like a Two-Hour Journey Into Self-Perception
There is no fixed script and no defined exhibits — each visitor's own experience is the exhibition's subject.
Where Does Gentrification Come From, Why Is It Inevitable, and How Does It Produce Inequality? | Notes on Reading About Cities (Part 2)
This is a books column, and what follows recommends several books about cities and gentrification. These reading notes are long, so they're published in three parts. This is the second.
Architecture Firm UNstudio Asks: If We Reorganize How We Live, Can Ordinary People Get a Voice?
And what role should technology play in that?
Nine Years of Greed Around LeEco, and the Reckoning at Last
On April 26, LeEco's stock was suspended from trading again — the 29th time in its nearly nine years as a public company. It may well be the last.
Beyond Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science: What Else Should We Know About May Fourth?
Treating May Fourth only as a political movement, or only as a subject for intellectual history, isn't enough. We should place it within a long historical arc and show its different faces one by one.
30 People, 13 Books, 5 Big Questions: What You Should Know About May Fourth
What kind of movement was May Fourth, really? How should we judge it? What made it unique, and how did it shape twentieth-century Chinese history? And from where we stand today, how should we look back on it and mark its anniversary?
The Things That Are Sensitive, Loud, and Make You Look Twice — That, Perhaps, Is Art
Starting this week, QDaily launches a new column, "Art & Exhibitions," updated weekly. We'll try to show the art world as it really is — real, interesting, and, at times, not entirely likable — through an independent lens.
How Many New Isms Does Contemporary Life Have? Here's a Little Ism Dictionary | 100 Big Questions About Life
Every "xx-ism" is a microcosm of its era.
Liu Heung Shing, Pulitzer-Winning Photographer and a Man Who Has Seen a Lot | Interviews
Liu Heung Shing believes a photograph — a good one especially — depends more on what the photographer knows than on what he sees.
30 Years Ago, the Game Boy Carried Tetris to the Whole World — and Gave Humanity One More Way to Get Hooked | QDaily Business History
From games to gamification: it took 30 years for pixels on a screen to start steering human behavior
Why Sweden Became a Hotbed for Great Games
Sweden has built game-development systems all over the country. How individual creative energy gathers and bursts out inside them may hold a lesson for places short of creativity.
Vertebra Theatre Loves Plays About Real Life, and Won’t Duck the Feelings Everyone Faces | Great Little Studios
“Living takes a lot of surface noise and glitter, things that make you laugh right away. But then why do you read books, why do you travel? Sometimes you need something with a different rhythm and depth, something that nourishes and widens your experience of life.”
How Are We, as Human Beings, Related to One Another? | Reading Notes on the City, Part 1
This is a book column, so what follows recommends a number of books about cities and gentrification. The notes run long, and we are publishing them in three parts.
We Must Stand Up for What We Believe, No Matter the Odds or the Consequences
This week's editor's picks from QDaily.
Seven Years of 8 Mile Underground: Where Did the Freestyle Go?
So what is freestyle?
There Is No True "Bauhaus City," But Bauhaus Did Shape Our Urban Space | QDaily Business History
Since the International Style was first proposed, it has grown ever more common for a single architectural and urban form to win admirers across the globe. The more important question is: who gets to define the International Style?
“I-Photography” Threw Off Ideology and the Duty to Record Reality. What Is It, Exactly?
Its standard is no longer the precise description of an event, but the mood inside a lived experience.
Courier Growth Slows for a Second Year: What That Says About Delivery and Consumption
Courier delivery is the infrastructure of e-commerce, and e-commerce has been one of the biggest drivers of Chinese consumption over the past decade.
Buildings Come Alive in Her Lens: Thirty Years of Hélène Binet
The architect Daniel Libeskind once said of her work: "Every photograph Binet takes reveals a building's achievement, its force, its emotion, and its vulnerability."
The $100 Sneaker: What Kind of Market Is This, Really? | Market Inventors
The mid- and low-priced sneaker market has turned into a converging free-for-all: design, distribution, marketing and the supply chain are all changing.
11 Photo Books in 5 Years: Behind Same Paper Is a Group of People Who Want to Express Themselves | Great Little Studios
"Against Instagram's tireless, always-updating feed, the photo book is still an excellent antidote — one shot, right on target, and always a sharper, deeper read."
What Rules of the Game Built the Marvel Universe, the Most Successful Movie Product in History?
It isn't just the world-ending spectacle and the comic-book fans.
Traveling Through Time and Memory: Pulitzer Winner Jennifer Egan on Fiction, Journalism, and Writing | Interviews
"I rely on my memory of time and space to write."
A German Director Between Science Fiction and Art: What Happened to German Sci-Fi?
Under Hollywood's monotonous but overpowering influence, how can German science fiction film sound a voice of its own and reach more people?
Take a Good Look: The Efficiency-Free Life of the Efficiency-Free Youth | 100 Big Questions About Life
The Efficiency-Free Youth accept that they are washouts, and believe the road to happiness runs not through turning a washout into an elite and then collecting the joy, but through working out how to live happily as a washout.
China's Car Sales Fell for the First Time in 30 Years. What Are Automakers Doing to Save Themselves? | Reporting From the 2019 Shanghai Auto Show
Compact electric SUVs were everywhere at this year's show. With the market cooling, automakers are fighting for the hottest spot in ever-narrower segments.
Bauhaus at 100: As a Mode of Thinking, How It Shaped Modern Life (Part II) | QDaily Business History
You could also think of this as a "Bauhaus dictionary." This is Part II.
How Do You Stage a Conversation in a Bitterly Divided, Politicized Climate? TED's Third Try | TED2019 Dispatch
But prejudice and division don't disappear just because a few good ideas exist.
Institute for Provocation, the Independent Art Space That Gives City Life a Fragile Vitality | Great Little Studios
"We're all young people, so it's not really that big a favor — we just need this kind of atmosphere"
Bauhaus at 100: How a Way of Thinking Shaped Modern Life (Part I) | QDaily Business History
This is the second piece in our "Bauhaus at 100" series.
On the ‘Badlands’ of 1930s Peking, He Builds a City of Mystery and Crime | Interviews
“Crime stories are like lifting the lid off a city and looking inside — the things nobody notices, and the things a halo has hidden, are all laid out flat. In front of a dead body, no one can stay silent.”
From the Socialist Party of the Netherlands to Public Museums: A Dutch Design Vendor's 26 Years of Watching the Trade | 100 People With Ideas
"Designers are machines that manufacture visibility." But who decides what deserves to be seen? And how much does the vendor weigh in that?
Visual China Is Not Alone: The Companies Whose Real Profit Center Is the Legal Department
Copyright and patent lawsuits pay well, and some large companies that once looked down on them have joined in.
Between Professional and Amateur: Legal Scholar Wang Renbo on Constitutionalism, the State, and the Individual | Interviews
"I remember a line from Edward W. Said: to keep an intellectual relatively independent, an amateur's attitude serves better than a professional's."
The Excelsior Hong Kong Bows Out: A Hotel’s Greatest Draw Is Its People | Hong Kong Street Life ⑳
“Hong Kong Street Life” is a QDaily column by outside contributors, devoted to setting down, as quickly as it can, whatever sketches it can manage of a place that is changing fast.
No Forbidden Zones in Reading
This week's picks from QDaily's editors.
What Is Antitrust Really Against ⑥: How Have Superpower Companies Changed Over the Past 50 Years?
Perhaps the biggest change is that being "big" is no longer a fault
"Contemporary" Makes Less and Less Sense — Here Are 15 New Ways to Look at It | 100 Big Questions About Life
Is "contemporary" the biggest meme of the contemporary era?
Bauhaus at 100: Why a School and a Style Emerged in Postwar Europe | QDaily Business History
We are publishing three articles in this series. This is the first.
What Is Antitrust Really Against ⑤: Google Is Back Before Congress Over Its Control of Information — What Charges Have Piled Up Against It?
The problems are being laid out one by one; a workable fix has yet to appear
Before Gentrification: The Robert Taylor Homes and the Failure of the City | QDaily Annual Book Recommendations ⑲
Racialized concentrated poverty and joblessness come out of the broad economic restructuring of deindustrializing central cities — the same cities where low-income minorities are disproportionately concentrated.
How to make a building fit its surroundings: Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima offers some examples
In a Wuzhen lecture titled *Environment and Architecture*, she set out her core idea: tearing down the traditional architectural boundary between indoors and out.
Kazuo Hirai Is Stepping Down: He Saved Sony, and Watched Japan Lose Its Voice in Consumer Electronics | QDaily Business History
The consumer electronics market is bigger than it has ever been. Sony is no longer one of its central players.
fRUITYSPACE, the Unpretentious Beijing Basement Where Anything Goes, Music Included | Great Little Studios
Not the least bit grand, not the least bit profound — but interesting all the same.
Being Used to Something Doesn't Make It Right
This week's picks from QDaily's editor-in-chief.
Bilibili Creator ilem: An Ordinary Otaku, an Extraordinary Name in the Anime World | 100 People With Ideas
He is adored on Bilibili, but he treats it all as an outlet for a private hobby, and seems oblivious to his own fame.
Didu Hui, a Design Account on WeChat, Tries to Ease the "Sense of Losing Control" in the Big City | Great Little Studios
What they believe is that the more people understand, the more this feeling of losing control, of being pushed around by enormous forces, eases.
Steven Holl: An Idealist Architect Who Found His Best Years in China's Giant Projects
China is new, and so are its businessmen.
The EU's New Copyright Law Changes the Internet's Free-Content Principle — and Could Bring 8 Unsettling Futures
For the long-running conflict between internet platforms and content creators, this may not be the end of one problem but the beginning of many.
Contemporary Art for Every Sense Comes to Wuzhen, Trying to Answer to "Time"
Across three sites in Wuzhen — the Xizha scenic area, the Beizha Silk Mill and the Grain Depot — sound art, scent art, interactive art, installation art and video art, gathered from around the world.
Mediterranean historian David Abulafia: Exchange between civilizations shaped human history, but it is no cure-all | Interviews
"What matters, rather, is tolerance born of practical self-interest. Once it rises to the level of religion or anything like it, people turn very harsh."
Who Decides How Long a Traffic Star Lasts?
Individual traffic stars may be short-lived, but the traffic-star phenomenon endures.
The Poor in an Affluent Society, and America's Growth Predicament | QDaily Annual Book Recommendations ⑱
Why did the American economy succeed, and why is that success so hard to sustain today?