American Foreign Policy… On Think Tanks, or, What Trump Didn’t Get in Helsinki 17 Jul 201818 Jul 2018 The Trump administration has brought with it a dark winter of discontent to US think tanks. Institutions stocked with the analytical rosters of former Clinton and Obama appointees with North Korea-related expertise…
American Foreign Policy… North Koreans Watching Fox 24 May 2018 This post operates on sanity-preserving ground rules: No referring to: think-pieces, think-tank analyses, journalistic hot takes, outraged or absurd Tweets (other than those thumbed out by POTUS), Chuck Schumer's courageous…
Kim Jong-un… On the Perils of Journalistic Moonlighting for Academics 19 May 201818 Dec 2020 The inter-Korean summit which occurred on 27 April 2018 coincided with a rare stretch of open time and full energy for me, so I was able to write three pieces…
Chinese communist party… Thunderclouds Over the Honeymoon: Xi, Kim, and the Trump Summit 18 May 2018 Amid the welter of diplomatic moves that have occurred in and around the Korean peninsula in 2018, the two meetings in quick succession between the North Korean leader and China’s…
Art… Walls as Multivalent Icons in Early People’s Republican Cartoons, 1946-1951 13 Apr 2018 The rise and ultimate victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese civil war, and Mao's galvanizing intervention into the Korean War, was accompanied and supported by a wave…
Cultural Politics… Notes on North Korean Musical Exchanges and Internal Narratives 30 Mar 20186 Apr 2018 A lot of people seem to be interested in North Korean cultural diplomacy these days, so the (often peer-reviewed/probably badly flawed/usually enormously fun) work which I have been doing on…
Beijing… Media Blackout in Beijing: Reading the Empty Spaces during the Kim Jong-un Visit 30 Mar 2018 Among the dozens of subplots feeding into and out of the curious-but-necessary welcome by Xi Jinping of Kim Jong-un this week is the question of information access and what it…
American Foreign Policy… New Book Reviews: Espionage in Republican China, and Britain’s Role in the Korean War 30 Mar 201830 Mar 2018 My two new book reviews engage with the intelligence history of two chaotic decades in China, and the British role in the Korean War, respectively. Review of Panagiotis Dimitrakis, The…
Art… Cruel Resurrection: Chinese Comics and the Korean War 19 Mar 201819 Mar 2018 I wrote this article in the early 2000s under the direction of the ageless Chinese art historian Shen Kuiyi, with whom I did a "cognate field" during my doctoral studies…
Cultural Politics… Karl Haushofer and Japan (1): Geographers and Intellectual Links into the Fascist Period 6 Mar 20186 Mar 2018 This is the first in a multi-post project on German geographers and intellectuals and their interaction with Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, with a nominal focus on Manchuria and…
