A materials culture and the secure transport of light: Essays here tend to be about globalization and technology.| Dan Wang
Announcing my book; whalelore; Austrian Catholicism; the legacy of Moses and Rickover; Yunnan; influencer culture; how historians work.| Dan Wang
(This piece is my year in review; here’s my letter from 2022) I. Walking The trunk of an elephant might feel cool to the touch. Not what one expects, perhaps, from 200 pounds of writhing muscle, strong enough to uproot a tree, which tapers down to two “fingers,” giving it enough delicacy to detect the […] The post 2023 letter appeared first on Dan Wang.| Dan Wang
My 2022 letter will probably be my last. Now I have to devise another use for this site. Since I’ve just spent a few days in Singapore, joining various roundtables to discuss China, I thought I would write up the notes I presented on. Most of my remarks focus on technology. But with China, one must […] The post China notes, July ’23: on technological momentum appeared first on Dan Wang.| Dan Wang
(This piece is my year in review; here’s my letter from 2020) I’ve by now lived in each of China’s main megaregions. It is time to make assessments. Everything that can go wrong in urban design has gone wrong in Beijing. The climate is arid and prone to northerly sandstorms. Its streets are unwalkable, but […] The post 2021 letter appeared first on Dan Wang.| Dan Wang
(This piece is my year in review; here’s my letter from 2019) I. Inspiration It’s difficult to identify a great economic reason to explore space. There are easier ways to extract minerals, doing anything at all is terribly expensive, and Mars is a hard place to make a living. The benefits of space exploration are […] The post 2020 letter appeared first on Dan Wang.| Dan Wang
I was one of the luckier ones: After a lunar new year holiday to Rome and Naples, I returned to Beijing on February 1st. Friends who delayed traveling back from overseas are facing escalating hurdles in their return. Those who went to Japan or the US to escape COVID are confronting both the virus and […] The post Covid Observations from Beijing, March 11 appeared first on Dan Wang.| Dan Wang
Becoming a barbarian; an ideological revelry; lockdown; sweetgrass and banana leafs; crankiness; delightful animals; to the mountains| Dan Wang
The deepest bias in American intellectual society; a new Moby-Dick; the US isn't making the best robots; plastics; process knowledge as industrial deepening| Dan Wang