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If you watched Super Bowl LVII in the Washington, DC area, you may have caught the Michael & Son ad that took a comical twist on the Chinese spy balloon that has been in the news.  The local home-service company’s five-second spot depicted a white balloon with a “satellite” hanging from it, being popped by […] The post Best Ad of the Super Bowl? Michael & Son Explains Its Hilarious Balloon Ad. first appeared on Washingtonian.

In the pre-balloon era, China was busily engaged in a charm offensive. Following October’s Communist Party congress, at which Xi Jinping won an unprecedented third term in office, Beijing made moves to stifle the combative and confrontational group of diplomats known as wolf warriors. Xi hosted German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the capital, and condemned Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. The tone of China’s leading diplomats noticeably softened. Vice Premier Liu He, meeting with corporate executives in Davos, Switzerland, emphasized that China was back and open for business. And for the first time in almost six years,...

Shallow, fake, showy, and performative—these are a few of the adjectives used to describe BookTok, the corner of TikTok where young women share and discuss books on camera, by drive-by tourists to a culture they don’t understand. I’m no BookTok tourist. I’ve lived here for nine months. As a chronically online millennial, I’ve become a translator between the readers on BookTok and the literary community that looks down upon them. On TikTok, I post a video about Mary Ruefle that gets forty thousand views and yields comments like: “this just gave a whole new perspective on my entire existence.” In...

I have to admit that at first I didn’t see the Chinese spy balloon drifting into US airspace as the crisis that it would, well, balloon into. Countries spend large amounts of resources spying on each other, expanding their methods as new technologies become available. This is well-known. High-altitude intelligence gathering is routine. As a […]

  There was not much notice and thus I Could not announce it yesterday or before the weekend. There are lots of changes and hopefully, it will be easier for you to read and for me and the guest writer to write. In those cases in which I copy the article here have yet to find out. This morning I have been busy starting the blog all over again because Google changed everything and if it doesn't look changed is because I changed it back to what it was but can only do that in a few items. By the way,...