News That Stays News

Linked December 4, 2010

1. What we know about China and the Internet, courtesy of Wikileaks.

Li Changchun, a member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found “results critical of him.”

2. Old red-carpet gossip: Annie Proulx, the author of the short story that became Brokeback Mountain, trashed Crash after it upset Ang Lee’s film at the Oscars in a bitter piece in the Guardian with wonderfully sharp elbows.

3. A heartfelt article in the American Interest about the psychological burdens that veterans take home with them. Young male veterans of the Iraq war have an unemployment rate of 21.6%, and some 10,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now homeless.