Articles
Reviews
The Wantok System (n+1, June 2020)
Philosophers of Babel (The New Inquiry, May 2014)
on The Dictionary of Untranslatables
Parent of All the Gods (Los Angeles Review of Books, March 2014)
on religion in China
Gatsby in Asia (The Daily Beast, June 2013)
on Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians
Party TV (The New Inquiry, December 2012)
on Ying Zhu's Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central Television
Ghosts in the Machine (The Daily Beast, December 2012)
on Hsiao-Hung Pai's Scattered Sand: The Story of China's Rural Migrants
Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (The Daily Beast, March 2012)
on the bloodiest civil war in history and the birth of modern China
Land of the Rising Zun: Yiddish to Japanese Dictionary
Has 28,000 Entries (Jewish Daily Forward, January 2012)
Saying Mazel Tov in Mandarin (Jewish Daily Forward, January 2012)
Zellig's Disappearing Act (Jewish Daily Forward, August 2011)
on Robert Barsky's Zellig Harris, biography of Chomsky's mentor
Travels
City of Protest: On Hong Kong with Jeff Wasserstrom (The Nation, January 2020)
Wherefore Art Thou Luomiou? (Foreign Policy, January 2015)
Shakespeare booms in China
Endangered Speakers (n+1, Spring 2014) subscription only
documenting the languages of immigrants, refugees, and exiles in NYC
Days of Wine and Rosaries (Harper's, July 2013)
Tibetan Catholics making wine and building churches
Ten Megacities of the Near Future (Lapham's Quarterly, December 2010)
from Kinshasa to Jakarta, the future of the megacity
The Silk Road Unravels (Open Democracy, July 2009)
the dark side of Silk Road frenzy and the destruction of Kashgar
Letter from Motor City (Open Democracy, June 2009)
techno, urban farming and guerrilla art in the Detroit ruins
Reports
Talk of the Town (Artforum, October 2019)
Cyborg Tongues (Logic, April 2018)
Uber for Tutors? (Dissent, Fall 2015)
Two Occupys, and the New Global Language of Protest (Dissent, Summer 2015)
Is the Islamic State Exterminating the Language of Jesus? (Foreign Policy, August 2014)
Radical Linguistics in an Age of Extinction (Dissent, Summer 2014)
linguistic equality and sources of radical possibility
The Internet, where languages go to die? (Al Jazeera, March 2014)
95 percent of languages are barely online
The Rise of Yiddish Online (Slate, February 2014)
the unlikely cyberlife of a struggling language
Chinese Workers Foxconned (Dissent, Spring 2013)
the world's biggest manufacturer, the hottest gadgets, the future of Chinese labor
China-Built Projects in US Stir Up Environmental Concerns (Chinadialogue, September 2012)
Indentures are a sign of universities' decline into a factory system (Times Higher Education, August 2012)
China's Instant Cities, Thirty Years On (Lapham's, November 2010)
instant dystopias or models of eco-dense 21st century living?
Histories
Why We Mourn the Loss of a Printed 'Forward' (The Nation, January 2019)
China's Westward Expansion and Its Discontents (Al Jazeera, March 2014)
the Kunming attacks and the forgotten genocide
In the Genizah of Dying Languages (Jewish Currents, Autumn 2012)
endangered languages in China and the Jewish ethnographic tradition
Riding the Godless Express (Lapham's Quarterly, February 2010)
a short, curious history of the Soviet war on God
Nero's Fiddle, Gaddafi's Fiction (Lapham's Quarterly, March 2010)
politicians and dictators making art (usually badly)
A Beautiful Moment in Ladino's Twilight Hour (The Jewish Chronicle, May 2008)
This work is under a Creative Commons license.
Last updated: 15 July 2020.