When writing Fir and Empire, I was taken aback by the stories in Gong Hui 龔輝, Collected Essays on Timber…
I taught Modern East Asia for the second time this year. Really fun class to teach. The thing that struck me the second time around was how essentially every situation in post-World War II Asia had a wide range of political possibilities, including large groups of moderates and…
Since I started this project nearly a decade ago I’ve been trying to develop a…
Once again I find myself with material that’s not going to make it into the book.
I have argued here (and more concisely and correctly in a forthcoming article) that forestry emerged by the third century BCE as growing states faced the threat of wood and…
Jeremy Rifkin’s book on the “Third Industrial Revolution” has been out for a while, but I was thinking about the concepts and had a sudden brainstorm that seemed worth writing down.
Having spent six years (or more) researching forests and land rights in Ming-Qing China, it’s strange that I never spent much time with the Huizhou cadasters. Well, I finally pulled them out last December.
Thanks to some very productive periods at Max Planck in Berlin and at Yale, I’ve had a chance to do some new work. This is building into a chapter where I consider the shifts in wood requisitions in the Ming and Qing. The pocket version of the argument is this: the Ming…
There has been a lot of talk of Artificial Intelligence in the popular press recently. A lot of this stems from the 4–1 defeat of Lee Sedol — arguably the world’s best (human) Go player — by AlphaGo, an…
A few resources for accessing firewalled academic articles and books have just been brought to my attention. Sci-Hub uses donated passwords to get around firewalls and download articles; these are then deposited at Library Genesis (LibGen) — already a very large repository of pirated…
