On Friday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had a courtesy visit with the Honorable Han Zheng, his counterpart from Shanghai. This got The Observer wondering what the two might have to discuss—besides who has better soup dumplings—so we turned to global urbanism expert, Columbia professor, Professor Skyscraper himself, Vishaan Chakrabarti and posed this question. Here is what he had to say in an email. Read More
The Ohio State Controlling Board approved on Monday a $200,000-a-year, four-member trade office for the Buckeye state in Shanghai, according to a spokeswoman for that state’s Department of Development. (The office will be jointly funded by the Ohio Soybean Council, which has a keen interest in selling soybean products overseas.)
That beats New York, whose Read More
Ever since my son was old enough to bang on a glass with a pair of chopsticks, I’ve been going for dim sum in Chinatown, a few blocks away from where I live. Now, still close to home 17 years later, eating oysters deep-fried in fortune-cookie-shaped wontons and fabulous green dumplings stuffed with mushrooms and Read More
Ever since my son was old enough to bang on a glass with a pair of chopsticks, I’ve been going for dim sum in Chinatown, a few blocks away from where I live. Now, still close to home 17 years later, eating oysters deep-fried in fortune-cookie-shaped wontons and fabulous green dumplings stuffed with mushrooms and Read More
By the time I sat down for a studio screening of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, I was braced by all the advance hype from Venice and Toronto, as well as the local showbiz columns and media outlets, for the supposed shock of two men in cowboy hats acting out the old underground jokes about the Read More
By the time I sat down for a studio screening of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, I was braced by all the advance hype from Venice and Toronto, as well as the local showbiz columns and media outlets, for the supposed shock of two men in cowboy hats acting out the old underground jokes about the Read More
Excerpts from a review of the new movie Kung Fu Hustle from kids-in-mind.com, a movie Web site for parents.
KUNG FU HUSTLE
Highly stylized martial arts comedy taking place in an anachronistic version of 1930′s Shanghai: The dominant criminal gang invades a slum, but has a very hard time subduing its residents when some Read More
Double Vision: A Self-Portrait , by Walter Abish. Alfred A. Knopf, 220 pages, $24.
We’re all impatient for the memoir to evolve-who needs more cross-eyed mirror-gazing?-but don’t expect the first stabs at a less narrowly focused generation of autobiographical writing to be 20-20, or even particularly legible. Case in point is Walter Abish’s Double Read More
You Win Some, You Dim Sum
At Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s 66
I first came to 66, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s new Chinese restaurant in Tribeca, for Sunday dim sum. The restaurant, designed by Richard Meier, wasn’t busy at all, unlike Sunday in Chinatown, where waiting an hour in a crowded lobby for your number to be called Read More
Chop, Chop! Shanghai Chef
Revives Lost Art of Cutting
Lozoo means “green tea” in Mandarin, but more people at Lozoo, on Houston Street, seem to be guzzling the house cocktail, which is bright blue. The group at the table next to mine one evening had ordered four. One of the diners, a young Italian Read More
