Freedom and Creativity Are What Really Sparkle

QDaily's editor-in-chief picks this week's highlights for you.

This week's top recommendation is the series on "Amazing Little Studios."

We began with an overview that briefly introduced the 45 small studios we would go on to cover, and explained why they are worth paying attention to.

We think these people have energy, ideas, and a certain sparkle about them. They are creators inside the city, and they meet a set of standards: they offer everyone who takes an interest in them at least one idea and one way of living; they turn a private hobby into something a group can belong to; they care about more than themselves; they want to be unconventional and actually manage it; they keep producing ideas; and while they of course have to make a living somehow, they care more about what they create and why than about any "business model." After all, freedom and creativity are what really sparkle.

Since these people are all creators inside the city, what the small studios do can, in a sense, help sketch out those invisible "dwellings" — and help define a city. A city is where detail and possibility find room; urbanism creates a hunger for richness and inclusiveness, and a studio, usually the hobby of one person or one group, is the most direct expression of that hunger. So QDaily hopes this series can uncover what is lovable about cities. We should go looking for it, and we welcome readers' tips on the sparkling things they have found.

After the overview, we published two long features in the "Amazing Little Studios" series this week, one after the other.

The first is about Yeast, founded in early 2018. Its founders describe Yeast as a "future food lab," and explain that the "experiments" in "laboratory" really mean doing research and coming up with plans and ideas about food. Their current interest, for instance, is in how digitalization is changing physical cities and, in turn, how people eat — something that could become a business selling urban data to restaurants and hotels. The studio began with research into the relationship between eating and Chinese cities by Colombian chef Federico Duarte, a Yeast co-founder. With Space 10, IKEA's innovation lab, they also published a report titled Food and the Mega City: How Technology and Urbanization Are Changing the Way China Eats, full of interesting observations.

The second is also about eating: the story of the independent publication Eat reallwant and the art practice of its founders, Dagua and Shanshan. They visited nighttime "taxi drivers' homes" (the street villages where cab drivers gather to rest). They spent two years collecting the work meals of people in different occupations, a series they called "business lunch," recording what people actually eat and how they live inside their jobs. They moved into Dameisha, an urban village in Shenzhen, and spent 82 days documenting the food and daily life they found in households there. And they photographed all 124 trash cans in Building A of a school's boys' dormitory, because "you can tell how someone lives by looking at their trash can."

If "Amazing Little Studios" is about uncovering what really sparkles in a city, the "2018 Stories" series is about recording — the actions and everyday lives of ordinary people. From January 2018 to January 2019, "2018 Stories" ran 10 articles. Around Spring Festival, we went back to the people in those 10 stories to record what had changed and what had not.

Wang Jing's daigou business — buying goods abroad for customers at home — is getting harder to run, and sometimes the pressure gets to her. Zhou Cheng gathered with relatives in Qinhuangdao; over Spring Festival, nobody talked about cryptocurrency anymore. Zhou Cheng didn't either. The relatives and friends who had asked him to buy Bitcoin for them were in low spirits. But like him, they were all still holding, still waiting to see. Not long after winning her labor arbitration case in November 2018, Ming Jue found a new job as a preschool teacher. Mengbao Wangguo Kindergarten has shut down its operations, but Wei Wenquan, the principal who lost the case, has appealed anyway; the second hearing opens on February 27.

Freedom is a good thing, and it sparkles, but winning it and keeping it has a price, sometimes a steep one. You have to get through a long night before you see anything shine. Many countries' transitions run aground exactly here. And even a successful transition can leave problems behind.

This week we published an interview with Oxford professor Eugene Rogan (part one and part two), which discusses the transition of Ottoman Turkey and the transitions of Arab countries. Both were hard: too much baggage, too much resistance. Yet Rogan, an optimist, keeps looking for signs of hope and progress. Perhaps the goal Arabs have long pursued — a transparent, accountable government — can eventually carry them through. After all, "Arabs want to end authoritarian government, want to be free of the fear in their lives, want a government that answers to them, and want power to change hands without a revolution."

Staying with Arab countries, another news item this week showed how hard transition can be. Saudi men are using a phone app to track and monitor women, and Apple says it will look into it. To this day, Saudi women remain bound by the guardianship law, which requires every woman, whatever her age, occupation, or marital status, to have a male guardian — usually a father, a brother, or a husband.

Besides the Middle East, Russia is another good example. This week we published an annual book recommendation on Russia's history and present. In it, Tao Xiaolu introduces three books — The Spy and the Traitor, Gorbachev: His Life and Times, and The Future Is History — running from the Cold War through the Soviet collapse to Putin's Russia, and picking up details that settled out of Russia's fast-moving history. Will the future really repeat history, as Masha Gessen argues? We can only watch quietly.

Then there is Germany. This week the "Why Read" column recommended Children of Nazis, and the question it raises is worth sitting with. The book looks at the childhood homes and adult lives of the children of senior Nazis such as Himmler, Göring, and Hess. The gulf between life before and after 1945 changed the course of those lives: some condemned their fathers' crimes and felt deep shame, others missed, unconditionally, war-criminal fathers the rest of humanity spat on. That raises plenty to think about — whether a person should feel answerable for crimes their parents committed, or even guilty because of them.

Even now, anything to do with the Nazis can set off an argument in Germany. On February 9, the German city of Nuremberg held a contested auction at which five paintings said to be by Adolf Hitler failed to sell. In Germany, trading Hitler's artwork is legal, but publicly displaying Nazi symbols is still illegal outside specific educational or historical contexts. To comply with the law, the auction house had to erase Nazi emblems and symbols from the catalogue. Commentators questioned whether allowing such an auction at all was ethical, especially in Nuremberg.

History always weighs on the conversation, so let's look at some creative work next and lighten the mood.

For his filmmaking of the past 10 years, Thai independent director Apichatpong Weerasethakul won the 8th Artes Mundi, the British contemporary art prize; the winning short is Invisibility. The jury's reasoning: "When times are hard, it's sometimes unsafe to speak plainly about them. Apichatpong offers us some subtle tools of resistance: an art that is invisible and disguised is a powerful weapon."

Danish director Lars von Trier has a new work out: a diamond exhibition built around his films, which opened last Friday (February 8, local time) at M HKA, Antwerp's leading contemporary art museum, and runs through May 5.

Hirokazu Kore-eda came under pressure over Shoplifters — how does he see the society he lives in? Kore-eda says his films are a quiet critique of contemporary Japanese society. They tend to look at people who are isolated and pushed to the margins, and at souls who are successful in their work but numb and unaware.

The 2019 Royal Academy Architecture Prize was announced on February 8; the winners are American architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. The two are married and founded the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro together; New York's High Line, in Manhattan, is one of their best-known works. Also on architecture: a new style has emerged in Bolivia that blends local weaving colors with patterns from Inca ruins.

The Unicode Consortium revealed last week that among the 230 new emoji it has approved is one for menstruation: a red droplet. "The emoji can express what 800 million women around the world go through every month. It is a huge step forward, and an important step toward normalizing periods and smashing the stigma around them," said Lucy Russell, head of girls' rights and youth at Plan International UK.

In Thessaloniki, Greece, residents can now collect the plastic waste they have used and turn it, through 3D printing, into "urban furniture" for parks. Along the same lines, the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee announced on its website that a project to make the medals for the 2020 Tokyo Games out of recycled electronic waste is about to hit its target, having already collected 48,000 tonnes of e-waste.

Finally, a few more things worth noting:

On February 10, Roderick MacFarquhar (Chinese name Ma Ruode), Harvard professor of history and political science and a specialist on the Cultural Revolution, died of heart failure at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at 89. Six days later, Li Rui, another scholar of Mao Zedong, also died, at 102. Two scientists died recently as well: Walter Munk, "the Einstein of the oceans," and Nobel chemistry laureate Manfred Eigen.

A new study finds that America's greatest inequality comes not from differences between regions but from differences inside cities. In smaller places, parents are more likely to raise children into high earners, because living in a good neighborhood there usually costs less. People in small towns and cities also tend to rate the quality of their own neighborhood more highly than residents of big metropolises do.

Many young South Koreans think they have no future, but they refuse to accept it. Trying to break out of a dead end, they turned South Korea into a global hub for cryptocurrency trading. Now that the virtual currency market has collapsed, many are stuck in the mud: heavy losses, huge debts, or both. Even so, plenty of young South Koreans have not been scared off; they still believe digital currency can pull them out of a bleak future.

After analyzing ethnographic records from 60 societies around the world, anthropologists at Oxford University found seven universal moral rules: help your family, help your group, return favors, be brave, defer to your elders, divide resources fairly, and respect others' property. This is said to be the largest and most comprehensive cross-cultural study of morality ever done. The authors say their findings offer some answers to the debate between moral universalism and moral relativism.

Nick Pilfold, a biologist at San Diego Zoo Global's Institute for Conservation Research, and his team have confirmed that rare black leopards do live in Laikipia County, north of Kenya's capital, Nairobi. Recently, British wildlife photographer Burrard-Lucas captured one on film using a "camera trap" rig of 8 cameras. In the nighttime brush, the young leopard's coat gleamed and its eyes were bright. Elsewhere, in Erie, Pennsylvania, a rare "bilateral gynandromorph" northern cardinal turned up: half male, half female. Little is known about the phenomenon, but this kind of split in reproductive traits has been reported in birds, reptiles, butterflies, and crustaceans.

China has upgraded its filing system for online audiovisual programs; key web dramas will now need approval before shooting can start. From February 15, producers of key online film and TV productions must, before production, log into the "Key Online Film and TV Production Filing System" and register planning information such as the program's name, genre, content summary, and production budget.

Happy weekend, and good luck getting back to work!

Cover image: a still from The Shawshank Redemption, via Douban.