Imagethief

  • Decapitation!

    Doing comms when a leader is ousted. Also, travel fun!

    I just got home from a trip that took me around the world, from San Francisco to Amsterdam, from Amsterdam to Taiwan, and then back home.

    I arrived in Amsterdam at 6AM on a Monday morning with a full work day ahead. It’s always a treat to stay awake and productive after a sleepless flight and an early arrival. By the afternoon my eyeballs are vibrating like tuning forks. Finally going to sleep after one of these days is the purest bliss. It’s like rediscovering the whole idea of a bed. It’s so soft and welcoming and flat!

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    The hotel in Amsterdam was joined to the airport by a long corridor, which was convenient for everyone flying in for our event. But I stayed in a room with an inward-facing “atrium view” and for three days I saw little unfiltered daylight. This creates a space-station vibe that is bad for your body clock. Who cares what time it is when you’re unshackled from Earth’s natural rhythms like a Morlock?

    After a long-haul flight, the thing I want most is a shower to remove the film of plane-sweat and the lingering scent of disposable upholstery and economy class ravioli. The hot shower is one of the crowning creations of industrial civilization, something so pure and good it seems impossible that you could fuck it up. Unfortunately, some malignant tinkerer invented the “rain” style shower head, the kind mounted in the ceiling directly above you.

    I assume hotels install rain showers out of sadism. The shower cubicle is inevitably designed so you have to stand directly under the shower head to use the valves. These will be elaborate, like the controls of a steam locomotive, and nothing will be labeled. Just a collection of unmarked brass cranks and levers. I guess wrong 100% of the time and get blasted from above by the initial rush of cold water. What’s wrong with on/off, hot/cold? If I wanted horrifying Victorian plumbing, I’d live in London.1

    Then it was on to Taipei, a brutal 18-hour travel day. I had a three-hour layover in Munich, so I tried to talk my way into a Star Alliance lounge on the back of my outrageously expensive airline-affiliated credit card. According to my inexpert reading of the alchemical matrix on the credit card’s website, this should have worked, but the woman at the counter wasn’t having it. There is no walk of shame longer than the one after you’ve been tossed from the rope-line of a middlebrow airport lounge by a woman with a German accent. No cheese cubes for you!

    Flying from Europe to Taiwan is weird now due to the need to wind around various war zones and hot spots. The flight path looked like the pilots were slightly drunk and having trouble flying in a straight line. The world is troubled and unstable and everywhere there is strife and tension. If only there were something—some kind of Forum—where leaders from government, business and civil society could come together to discuss meaningful solutions and collaborate to make the world a better place…

    Hold that thought.

    Read the rest on Substack

    Let’s talk about your severance…

  • The Ticking Spine Bomb

    My lower back counts me down to mortality

    I threw my back out. It happened as I was out for a pre-dawn run. One moment I was a gliding athletic superman, the picture of health. The next, blam!, I was hobbled and shuffling, one hand on my spine and one foot in the grave. After a few minutes I was able to gingerly jog home. For the next couple of weeks my exercise routine was limited to walks and stretching.

    Among the things that my brothers and I inherited from our father is that we’re tall and we all have janky backs. I woke up with my first sore back on my thirtieth birthday. At the time, I thought, so much for my youth. That was 27 years ago.

    My back episodes are often multi-step disasters. There is a priming incident—I think of it as pulling the pin on a grenade—with a random delay of 0 seconds to three weeks until the actual explosion.

    This time, there were two possible priming incidents. The first was a hike on my last trip to Taiwan. The path between Tiger Mountain and Elephant Mountain in Taipei is mostly stone stairs up and down. It was belting rain and the path was slippery and during a descent I slipped on the edge of a step and landed on the next step down. It was just a few centimeters, but my knee was locked and I felt the shockwave go through my hips and into my lower back with a flash of pain. I thought, gonna pay for that later.

    The second possible priming incident was the trip home, later that week.

    If you gathered the world’s greatest scientists and asked them to create a device to destroy the human spine with maximum efficiency, they would create a baggage carousel. Consider: after twelve hours of enforced immobility in a seat with an interstellar void where lumbar support should be, you will have to drag an awkwardly shaped, 23-kilogram bag off a moving belt and over the lip of the carousel. This will require you to bend from the waist in exactly the way you are warned to never do when lifting heavy objects. If you’re unlucky and your bag is on the inside of the belt, god help you.

    Read the rest on Substack

  • The Endless PR Stunt

    America’s superstar pro-natalist couple hacks the media

    Have you heard about Malcolm and Simone Collins? They’re the American couple that have made themselves the poster-family for the “pro-natal” movement, which is an actual thing we have in the U.S. now. If you haven’t heard about them, congratulations! And I am so sorry to break your streak. But they’ve been profiled repeatedly and I know about them, so now you have to know about them, too. They look like this:

    A photograph of Simone and Malcolm Collins, seated, in front of a reflective window. Simone is on the left, dressed in a white bonnet with long drawstrings hanging down to her elbow level. She is wearing a black skirt over a white blouse with a ruffled neckline and puffy sleeves that end in ruffled cuffs, and her signature, chunky, black, round-framed glasses. Her hands are folded in her lap and she is looking down and to the right, in front of Malcolm. A toddler’s head is visible peeking from behind her left shoulder. Her overall presentation reflects her “techno puritan” aesthetic. Malcolm is dressed in a black leather jacket, black collared shirt and jeans, and square-rimmed black glasses, and is gesturing while speaking to camera for an interview.

    They are often pictured with more of their many children. Simone’s rural-trad presentation notwithstanding, this is a couple that famously met on Reddit a decade or so ago and that has been terminally online for years. They have strong “people you would sidle away from at a party” energy.

    Regrettably, the Collinses are fascinating both because of their cause (I have previously written about government pro-natal campaigns) and because of how successful they have been at getting themselves and the cause profiled. The current arc of coverage started in January and picked up speed through April, and I have read it so you don’t have to:1

    There are many more from last year and the year before. They may be decent at having kids (four plus one on the way), but they are undisputed world champions at getting into the press.

    Read the rest on Substack

  • Airshow!

    Family fun at America’s answer to the military parade

    We were living in Beijing in 2009 when the Party celebrated the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic. The main event was a giant military parade that would roll down Chang’an Avenue and past the Party dignitaries assembled on top of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which definitely sounds like a place to review a bunch of weapons.1

    Our apartment was east of downtown, along the same boulevard that becomes Chang’an Ave. A rail spur that normally delivered trainloads of coal to the huge power station next door made it a good place to stage the armored vehicles participating in the parade. It was also a good place to breathe a lot of coal soot and heavy metals, but that was Beijing in those days.

    The day of the parade dress rehearsal, I put my toddler son on my shoulders and we stood with our neighbors and watched hundreds of tanks roll down the street2 in front of our compound. Tanks on Chang’an Ave is a historically complicated image, but it was also undeniably cool. My son was raptured on a cloud of diesel fumes.

    After the rehearsal, I was excited to watch the actual parade in person. We would all line the streets and cheer for the might of China!

    We would do no such thing. In the best authoritarian tradition, there would be no disorderly public crowds along the route. Only carefully selected groups in carefully selected areas. I, a politically unreliable foreign dork, would have to watch on TV with the masses. Like everyone else who lived along the parade route, we were restricted to our compound during the day of the main event.

    Read the rest on Substack

  • Every Wolf Everywhere All at Once

    A slick company is suddenly inescapable

    Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! Did you hear about the company that brought dire wolves back from extinction?

    I sure did. Couldn’t miss it. The company is called Colossal Biosciences. On April 7th, Time Magazine dropped this cover story:

    A Time Magazine cover dated May 12, 2025. The cover is a side-on portrait of a white wolf, with its head turned towards the camera. The wolf is against a stark grey background. Below the “Time” logograph is the word “Extinct” with a red line drawn through it. Below that is the following text: This is Remus. He’s a dire wolf. The first to exist in over 10,000 years, Endangered species could be changed forever. By Jeffrey Kluger.”

    Cool, cool. I mean, it turns out it’s not actually dire wolf. They’re still extinct. And this is complicated. But we’ll get back to that.

    Also on April 7th, the New Yorker dropped this story:

    A screen capture from a New Yorker article. The image is a white wolf pup on a solid black background, The pup is facing the camera with its head lowered. The text reads “annals of zoology” and then the headline, “The Dire Wolf is Back.” Below that is the subbed, “Colossal, a genetics startup, has birthed three pups that contain ancient DNA retrieved from the remains of the animal’s extinct ancestors. Is the wooly mammoth next? By D.T. Max. April 7, 2025.”

    Credulous headline, but more nuanced subhed than Time’s breathless treatment. Also, squeeeee! Look at that adorable little foof! (Warning: adult wolves significantly less foofy.)

    But wait, like a late night TV ad for Ginsu knives (shout out to Gen-X), there’s more! Here’s Wired, on the same day:

    Hmm. “Scientists claim…” And a probing subhed. The new Wired goes hard, you may have heard, and won’t just lap up your glitz.

    Never mind! Here’s three hours of Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm on Joe Rogan’s podcast, also on April 7th. I’ll spare you the screen cap. Also, there was no way I was going to listen to three hours1 of this. I write this blog for free and there are limits to what I will endure for a wolf gag.

    Read the rest on Substack

  • The Art of Keeping Your Mouth Shut

    Never go to war with a popular TV program

    Way back in the early nineties, there was a popular sitcom called “Murphy Brown” set in a TV newsroom. The plot device of the lead character’s single motherhood offended then vice president Dan Quayle1, and he gave a speech in which he criticized the character by name, almost as if she were a real person.

    Delighted by the gift they had been handed, the writers duly wrote the remarks into the next season opener and nuked the vice president from orbit. Weeks later, America elected Bill Clinton2 president.

    Look, there are lots of reasons why the Bush/Quayle ticket went down. Among them were that Bill Clinton radiated white-hot sex (too much for his own good, tbh) while George H.W. Bush radiated Yalie barbershop quartet and surplus initials. But Quayle linking the recent LA riots to a sitcom didn’t help, and it enshrined a truism of modern public relations: don’t go to war with a TV show.

    We live in a different media era. Network sitcoms aren’t the vanguard of culture they were back in the nineties (the era of Seinfeld, Friends3, etc.), and the modern equivalent of that truism might be, “don’t go to war with a meme.”

    And, whatever you do, don’t go to war with a meme based on a popular TV show!

    Anyway, here is a New York Times story with the headline, “Duke University Wants No Part of ‘The White Lotus’”

    Read the rest on Substack

  • Re-Sanitized for My Protection

    Two Decades Walking the Lines of Self-Censorship

    Twenty years ago, I wrote a post on this old China blog, “Sanitized for My Protection,” in which I discussed my approach to self-censorship. The post was prompted by a reader comment asking me how I thought about the risks to myself as a resident foreigner blogging about China. The truth was, I hadn’t thought about it systematically, and it was interesting to give some shape to the risks and decisions that defined my writing.

    I never felt like I had the luxury of shooting my mouth off with complete abandon. This was mostly professional caution. As I wrote last September, in the post inaugurating this Substack, my boss at the PR agency I was working for was not a fan of my blogging. She was a former Chinese diplomat, well attuned to Chinese government sensibilities, and conservative in matters of public expression.

    I did get her into trouble once, in 2008. This was not through a blog post, but through a quote I gave to a reporter from The Guardian on China’s “50 Cent Party” (五毛党) of Internet propagandists. This is what ran in the story:

    According to popular lore, and a number of Chinese bloggers, each post made pays 50 Chinese cents or five mao. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a lucrative occupation. William Moss, an account director at the public relations agency Burson-Marsteller, calculates that a post needs to be made every four minutes during a gruelling 72-hour working week if you are hoping to earn the bare minimum wage in one of the country’s bigger cities.

    “Pocket money? Maybe. But I wouldn’t plan on sending the kids to college that way,” says Moss.

    Sounds like me.

    My sin was to imply that China’s nationalist astroturfers might not be receiving a living wage for their work in the service of the state. CIPRA, the government-linked China-International Public Relations Association, gave my boss an earful and she, in turn, gave me an earful. I probably laid low for a while after that, but, idk. It was a long time ago and I’m a fool.

    Read the rest on Substack

  • The Greatest Dis in History

    Settling a score with style on America’s biggest stage

    When I was in elementary school, there was a kid who teased me about my first name, which is Diccon. I’ll call him Eddy McNair. This is a made-up name because he’s probably a wonderful family man now and was just doing what ten year old kids did to other ten year old kids with funny names.

    Imagine that I bore a grudge, and wanted to get back at Eddy with the biggest dis possible. The most epic dis in the history of epic disses.

    I could work diligently my entire life to put myself in a position to become president of the United States. This would take decades of going to law school, clerking for some asshole judge, running for local office, clawing my way up to state Attorney General, being “tough on crime,” running for governor, serving a successful term or two with no major scandals, and then campaigning successfully for party nomination and the presidency.

    Against all odds, this works! I’m no Obama, so let’s say I make it when I’m in my fifties. I’m inaugurated and give a moving speech of national reconciliation. They tell me how to use the nuclear “football” and read me in on all the secrets. I get to see the frozen alien corpses. I bring peace to the Middle East; guide the nation though transition to renewable energy; save the whales, the bees and whatever your favorite threatened animal is. I find homes for all the abandoned kittens of the world. I win the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Kitten Prize, which is not a thing, but should be. I donate the honoraria to a charity that makes little prosthetic legs for landmine-sniffing rats that have had unfortunate accidents. Not once do I host the Kansas City Chiefs at the White House. I am a saint.

    Two terms come and go. It is time for my final State of the Union address. Before a joint session of Congress and televised live to a national audience, with my adoring family and invited guests—authors, actors, statesmen—gazing on from the VIP box, I stride to the podium. I gaze across the crowd, and toward the camera, into the eyes of a grateful nation. In my most sonorous and comforting baritone, I deliver my message:

    “My fellow Americans, members of Congress, honored guests. Today I stand before you, at the twilight of my career, to say just one thing.”

    I pause dramatically and everyone leans in. Whatever is coming next is huge…

    “Eddy McNair is a total dick. Fuck you, McNair! You know what you did.”

    I tear open my suit jacket to reveal my “Ed McNair is a Total Dick!” T-shirt. Then I raise two middle fingers to the camera, and several huge “Eddy McNair is a dick!” banners drop from the rafters along with a cloud of a red, white and blue balloons. I Crip Walk2 off stage and all the way to the limo to the sounds of a John Philip Sousa march because that is how we roll now.

    If this all worked flawlessly, I’d still have accomplished only one percent of what Kendrick Lamar pulled off on Superbowl Sunday a week ago.

    Read the rest on Substack

  • Fandom Politics

    When do the old rules of political communication become obsolete?

    Note: There are two things that have been on my mind as I observe everything happening in U.S. politics right now. I am using this space to think through them out loud. This is the first topic. Second to follow when time permits. I am not sure how well this holds together. Feel free to debate!

    On January 28th, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded just over a minute after lift-off. This was one of the defining, “where were you when…?” moments of my youth. I remember stapling my eyes to the television in a common area at my dorm at UC Santa Cruz.

    Later that day, President Reagan addressed the nation from the Oval Office. I’ve never been what you’d call a big Reagan fan—he wasn’t popular in the bong-littered halls of Porter College—but it’s good. A classic of public solace, delivered to a traumatized nation. Go watch it if you have five minutes.

    Read the rest on Substack

  • Getting Rid of a Python

    Getting Rid of a Python

    Welcoming the year of the snake by remembering my weirdest pet

    The following is the first chapter of a memoir I have been writing about my doomed attempt to co-found an internet game company in Singapore in 1995. It is snake-themed and, with the year of the snake arriving this Wednesday, I thought I’d publish it here.

    1995

    I had to get rid of a python.

    This was not straightforward. The snake was thirteen feet long and weighed as much as a Rottweiler. You couldn’t just tape up a note with a bunch of tear-away phone-number tabs in the Peets Coffee down in the Castro. Home wanted for large snake. Loves baths. Eats live rabbits monthly. Hazardous to pets and small children. Or put her in a padded box on the corner like you would a litter of kittens. None of my friends had any business caring for a Burmese python. I had no business caring for a Burmese python, but I’d been doing it since my then girlfriend, Michelle, had gifted it to me.

    That conversation, three years previously, had gone like this:

    Her: “Hey, my friend’s son has a Burmese python that he can’t take care of any more. I know you like snakes. Do you want to adopt it?”

    Me (trying to recall how big Burmese pythons get and playing for time): “Can I think about it?”

    The next day I came home from grad school and the snake was in my apartment, in a much too small enclosure, with an infestation of some kind of snake lice and an unshed scale obscuring one eye. 

    I took the BART train from San Francisco across the bay to Berkeley, where there was an exotic reptile store, and bought a paperback guide to Burmese python ownership. The first paragraph boiled down to, “You, an idiot, should not own this snake.” I also bought a brick of frozen rats, stuck together like miserable, furry burritos, and lugged it home. I was still not the weirdest person on BART.

    Read the rest on Substack

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