Grab your popcorn – opening ceremonies for Rio 2016 are tonight! It’s my favorite part of the Olympics; I really could do without the whole “sport” thing that comes after. And, one of my favorite parts of tonight’s opening ceremonies are when the various country...
When Usain competes, U.S. aid plummets. At Andrew Sullivan's Daily Beast, Patrick Appel offers a few hypotheses about why Americans seem to care less about the killing of Sikhs than the killing of...
Andrew Sullivan's blog has been running a series of reader reactions on the subject of the Olympics and nationalism. A recent entry:Gabby Douglas' gold medal is being hailed all over the place as a...
Following on Charli’s excellent post about the Olympics, I thought I’d add my two cents.If you live outside of North America, (okay, and Scandinavia) you probably didn’t know. The fact is the...
Last week, Ban Ki-Moon made his standard plea for an Olympic Truce during the XXI Olympic Winter Games from Feb. 12 to Feb. 28 February and the X Winter Paralympic Games from March 12th to 21st.Thing is, the concept of the Olympic Truce is based on two fallacies: 1) that nation-states (which are the units of contestation in the Olympics) are also the containers of political community and 2) that they are the wagers of war against one another whose actions must be tamed.But actually, the fault-lines of global violence fall not between states but rather within them, evident in the fact that...
Much was made over the weekend of 14 gang deaths in Rio, host of the 2016 Olympics, forcing Brazil onto the defensive. I wonder if the same attention would have been given to the following news story from last week, had Chicago won the bid:Community activists said the recent murder of a Fenger High School honor student exposes a problem many teens face every day: safe passage to and from school. “I wonder how many more teens will be murdered while coming home from school,” said Leonardo D. Gilbert, a Local School Council member in the Roseland community. “All this kid was trying to do was go...
Yes, the other big news story of the day. (OK, of yesterday.)
President Obama couldn't convince the Inernational Olympic Committee to let Chicago hold the next summer Olympics, but Nobel Committee decided he's a skilled enough diplomat to receive a Nobel Peace Prize - only months into his Presidency. This is not lost on commentators and twitterers, some of who are referring to this as a "consolation prize" for losing the Olympics bid. ChicagoBlog writes: "Barack Obama couldn't convince the IOC to award Chicago the 2016 Olympics but somehow managed to sway the Nobel Committee to declare our freshman president deserving of the most distinguished peace...
The Olympics ended about 12 hours ago, but NBC is giving us the tape-delayed broadcast this evening. One last set of semi-structured Olympic thoughts…Its pretty clear that these games had massive political undertones. China viewed this as a coming out / coming of age celebration and invested accordingly. The infrastructure was impressive (gotta love that water cube), and their performance was impressive, with the top gold medal haul, though the US was tops in overall medals. If you use the Boswell formula, China edged the US in total performance, a big thing for them. --The political...
Could be my lack of expertise in Chinese diplomatic discourse, but I've found myself doing double-takes at the frequency with which Chinese elites have referred to "feelings" in statements to the Western media lately. Take Gao Xiqing's interview on 60 Minutes Sunday. Pressed by Leslie Stahl on whether the Chinese should submit to an official code of conduct for sovereign wealth funds, he responds: "Why do you need a law like that? That law will only hurt feelings. It's not economic. It doesn't make sense. Politically it's stupid."Then, on last night's News Hour, when asked whether the...