Remember the Moments of High Emotion and Panic

QDaily's editors pick the best of the week.

The first piece we recommend this week reads like a diary.

"#The Corrected Lovers" was a much-discussed topic on Weibo 20 days ago, but as these things usually go, people soon stopped mentioning it. It was a performance-art project started by two young art practitioners to "protest institutions that offer conversion therapy for homosexuality." It had a more vivid name: "Three Billboards" — after the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, protesting by way of billboard posters.

From January 11 to January 14, we followed three trucks carrying slogans as they drove through Shanghai and Nanjing, recording everything that happened, down to the smallest detail. That includes the three slogans: treatment for a "disease that doesn't exist"; the Chinese Diagnostic Criteria for Mental Disorders still lists "sexual orientation disturbance"; it's been 19 years — why? It also includes how the organizers talked with the conversion-therapy institutions, how they thought about getting the project the widest possible reach, how their preparations fell short, and how they improvised, "doing what little they could in the little time they had."

Once something takes on meaning, people tend to overlook how it actually happened — to overlook the moments of high emotion and panic among the people who did it. That is a misunderstanding at the root. In fact, it's the latter that matters.

Our books-of-the-year column ran its fifth installment this week — the first in the nonfiction series — on conservative thought in China.

If you don't know much about "conservatism," this piece is a worthwhile introduction.

The author, Wang Jianxun, is an associate professor at the School of Law of China University of Political Science and Law, and works mainly on constitutional theory and the classical liberal tradition. He wrote Taming Leviathan, translated American Federalism, and edited Twenty Lectures on Self-Governance. He strips away the tangled, over-complicated definitions as far as he can, and lays out the origins and principles of conservatism and its relationship to liberalism.

One backdrop to Wang's discussion is that in recent years more and more works of conservative thought have been translated into Chinese. But because China has long lacked a conservative tradition, people inevitably misread it in all sorts of ways. The biggest misreading is probably confusing conservatism with conservatives, old-guard traditionalists, or anti-reform factions. Others wrongly believe conservatism works in some countries and not in others.

This week we also traced the history of cyberpunk — a reasonably thorough, sharp short history.

The word "cyberpunk" appeared in the 1980s and quickly set the framework and plot patterns that would hold for decades: high tech and low life, authority against individual will, freedom of thought against control by higher powers, the beautiful world technology was supposed to bring against the corrupt metropolis it actually produced. Technology liberates and it also confines. And then there's the old theme of the search for freedom.

It ran alongside 1980s pop culture: the underground hacker world, street hip-hop, the rock synthesizers of London and Tokyo.

But the cyberpunk entertainment closest to us, Ready Player One, shows in full how cyberpunk has been popularized, thinned out and cheapened over the past decade.

One view holds that cyberpunk has "fallen behind" precisely because the grim dystopias it once imagined have all come true.

Tech giants that rule the world, seep into every corner, "collude with" or even manipulate governments, and don't care about actual human beings? Got that.

Virtual reality moving in, digital spaces that get everyone addicted? Got that.

You think cyberspace has given you freedom, but that freedom is in fact very limited. Got that.

High tech and low life? Got that.

Young people so worn down by reality that they can't help sinking into escapism? Got that.

Several new films that released trailers this week all point to the weight politics carries in individual lives.

Without exception they deal with flight and freedom. And in these films, it's obvious which places stand for freedom.

Never Look Away, the German film nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, draws on the early life and later career of the well-known contemporary artist Gerhard Richter. After watching his aunt taken away by the Nazis and sent to a gas chamber, the protagonist flees to West Germany, where he begins studying painting in earnest and uses it to express his thoughts and feelings; as an adult he is still tormented by the shadow and the trauma of the Nazi years and the East German regime he lived through as a child. The writer-director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, made The Lives of Others.

The White Crow tells the legendary story of how the former Soviet ballet master Rudolf Nureyev defected to the West. The screenplay is by David Hare, who also wrote The Hours and The Reader.

Mr. Jones, selected for the main competition at the Berlin Film Festival, follows an ambitious young Welsh journalist trying to dig out the truth about the Ukrainian famine. Because the government covered it up, the investigation soon became a matter of life and death. And since many intellectuals of the day were sympathetic to the Soviet regime, his reporting was unwelcome as well.

Music seems to have grown more interested in politics too. A paper newly published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies says negative emotion in pop songs has been increasing over the past 66 years. One important reason: "Love and romance have always been pop music's number one theme, but over the decades the lyrics and the lyrical style have changed significantly, reflecting social and political change."

The change isn't recent. Anger has been rising since the mid-1950s and peaked in 2015; sadness has been growing since the 1980s and hit its high point in the 2000s.

Americans of Generation Z, aged 18 to 24, hold political positions unlike those of the generations before them.

One survey found that they are more liberal and more radical on same-sex marriage, abortion, race, climate change and immigration — what Western political science usually calls leaning left.

Another survey claims that after the 2008 financial crisis they favor socialism over capitalism.

One clarification is in order: the idea of socialism now current in American society tends to stress programs such as universal health care, free education, expanded employment and guaranteed housing. Unlike the traditional definition, "democratic socialists" don't think the government should immediately control every part of the economy, nor do they advocate government ownership of enterprises.

Some people also point out that many young Americans have no clear idea what "socialism" means.

Ideology, like the great men who have died, is sometimes just an inheritance people use to make a point of their own.

A New York Times report shows Gandhi's awkward standing in India today. Well into the 21st century, Gandhi's halo is still bright across most of the world — except in India. Politicians still work the public's fondness for his memory, but there is no longer one agreed account of the "real Gandhi." In the eyes of Hindu nationalists, Gandhi was weak and ineffectual. He lived comfortably in a luxurious private house, so perhaps he wasn't as single-minded about the welfare of the poor as claimed. Gandhi may also have been a racist. His sex life has come in for criticism as well.

Michael Jackson's latest trouble is that Leaving Neverland, a documentary at Sundance, accuses him of sexual harassment, bringing back memories of the verdicts in the child molestation and conspiracy cases 13 years ago. Back then, the documentary's interview subjects denied that Jackson had ever behaved improperly toward them. The Jackson estate, of course, won't let them damage the King of Pop's good name: "This is not a documentary, it is a tabloid character assassination of Michael Jackson, the same treatment he suffered while he was alive."

Several pieces on cities this week were interesting. A city is the sort of place where problems gather more tightly, but where more varied solutions also sprout on their own.

If Chengdu's teahouse culture, civic life and public space interest you, we recommend this interview with Wang Di. As a historian, his work on Chengdu runs from the second half of the 19th century to the start of this century. Those books have also been coming out in Chinese translation in recent years. The interview was conducted in the Sichuan dialect, which adds some flavor.

Bangkok's air pollution has actually gotten this bad. To thin the smog that has covered the city for weeks, Bangkok sent out water cannons and sprayed water from drones. Neither fixes the long-term air quality problem. A decade ago the Thai capital's air got cleaner, a rare Asian case of pollution successfully brought under control, largely because the government banned the most polluting cars. But times have changed, and the good years are over. This month Bangkok made the list of the world's ten worst cities for air quality. Uncontrolled industrialization and urbanization, an appetite for buying cars, weak government regulation, crop burning on farmland and lighter winds in the dry season have all deepened the crisis.

Porto, in Portugal, has become a popular tourist city too. To set herself apart from the local government's glossy promotion, Margarida Castro, a 36-year-old native of Porto, started The Worst Tours five years ago. She and two other guides take visitors to the city's abandoned factories, worn-out railways and empty parking lots, hoping to show more people a truer side of the city. "Everyone seems to want to find the best chocolate cake, Porto's signature francesinha sandwich or the tourist attractions, so we shouldn't have much competition for 'worst,'" The Worst Tours' website says.

Oslo, the capital of Norway, began a somewhat radical urban reform at the end of December 2018, planning to remove 700 parking spaces in the city center and keep only some emergency spaces, garages and spaces for people with disabilities. Oslo is trying to answer a question: how does a city without cars keep running smoothly?

Beyond that, here are a few other interesting things:

Topf is the world's top "touring laundry expert." He has traveled with Madonna, Pink, Beyoncé and many other big names in music. His company is called Rock N' Roll Laundry, and it supplies equipment and laundry staff to tours. People describe him as a man with a "passion" for doing laundry. "Nobody [in the music business] used to deal with laundry, nobody wanted to learn how to do it, until I worked out a system," Topf said.

The New York Times wrote a history of Paramount's decline. The studio that once stood for Hollywood better than any other is now "a rental house" for soundstages, dressed up with the name "Pictures." Some people want to turn it around, of course, but it's hard.

The argument over e-cigarettes goes on. Britain thinks e-cigarettes may be a good way to quit smoking; the United States is more cautious and still prefers FDA-approved nicotine replacement. The long-term harms of e-cigarettes are still unsettled and need more research.

The cold snap brought by the polar vortex swept the American Midwest and Canada over the past week. Wind-chill temperatures fell as low as -40°C and -53°C. Some people take the cold snap as evidence that slaps down "global warming." But the opposite may be true: the cold snap may be proof of global warming. The warm air over the Arctic and the cold air hitting the American Midwest feed each other.

Male executives and analysts at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, all mentioned one surprising consequence: "MeToo has become a matter of risk management for men." Some companies trying to hold their risk down have cut back contact between female employees and male executives. That may cost women valuable chances to be mentored and their right of access to men.

New York State has confirmed a new rule for the social media age: selling fake accounts — what people usually call "zombie followers" — is illegal. Padded follower counts and bought "endorsements" are hardly unique to the American market.

The Guardian laid out the history of kidnap and ransom insurance and the argument around it. It's an odd kind of policy, one that reimburses the money paid to ransom a victim. Kidnap and ransom insurance began in the 1930s and became popular in the 1960s as the number of kidnappings across Europe rose. But it has always been contested: some governments have argued for banning it, on the grounds that it both encourages kidnapping and lets criminal gangs get more resources through ransoms. After 9/11 a new round of debate started around it — should criminals and terrorists be treated differently?

Nobody has reached agreement on paid parental leave either. Since 2015 the Gates Foundation has given parents of a new baby a full year of paid leave. But last week the foundation told employees it would cut that in half, to six months.

Modern weather forecasting has a very short history, dating from 1856. But the field has gone through a "quiet revolution." A report published in Science says weather forecasting has improved markedly over the past few decades. In accuracy, a forecast five days out is now as good as a one-day forecast was in 1980, and useful forecasts now reach 9 to 10 days ahead.

A few microbiologists plan to run an experiment lasting 500 years, to see how long endospores — the dormant bodies certain bacteria form inside their cells in harsh conditions — can stay alive. For the first 24 years they will test every 2 years. After that, for the remaining 475 years, they will test every 25 years.

If you plan to see The New King of Comedy over Spring Festival, there may be some changes. Unhappy with its screening schedule, the New King of Comedy team has applied to cut off the digital keys at 76 theaters. Some theaters have already pulled the film, but nothing is settled yet.

Right now the three Spring Festival films with the most screenings booked are Pegasus, directed by Han Han; Crazy Alien, directed by Ning Hao; and The New King of Comedy, directed by Stephen Chow — followed by The Wandering Earth, likewise adapted from a work by Liu Cixin.

By the way, here are 20 games worth trying in 2019.

Have a good Saturday at work!

Cover image from Revolutionary Road, via Douban