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Imagethief has a theory that at any given time, any given American cable TV system will be broadcasting an episode of ''Seinfeld.'' Admittedly, I tend to cruise the channels late, but that's what I see. Recent travels have given me an opportunity to surf not only the channels on offer at my mom's house in Palo Alto, but also those at my ...

Honestly, sometimes I think this country is a giant juggernaut that simply can't be stopped, and other times, well, to keep things polite, I don't. Yesterday I moaned about the giant sign going up outside my apartment windows. Today, the fates have delivered me some manner of rough justice. After a displaying an obviously tortured attempt at ...

A few days ago, on the construction site across the main boulevard from where I live, a set of huge characters went up, exhorting the workers to ''close the gap, finish the building''. OK, twenty-foot characters seemed a bit excessive, but exhortations hung on the side of construction sites are pretty common in this town. Then it turned out that ...

Imagethief stumbled blearily to his computer this morning expecting a relaxed scan of the news but found the Chinese Twittersphere ablaze with the news of Google's bombshell blog post, which went up in the middle of the night early this morning our time. Titled ''A new approach to China'', the post, by Google's Senior Vice President for Corporate ...

As a general rule, Imagethief dislikes business books, especially instructional ones. I find them tedious and most of them age faster than caviar on a car dashboard. There are, however, exceptions. Most of these are either books based on journalistic reporting of business events, such as, say, Kurt Eichenwald's ''Conspiracy of Fools'', or on ...

Update: Due to the obnoxious autoplay of the two videos, I have removed the embedded versions so as not to drive  people who visit the site rather than using RSS totally insane. You can follow the links in the paragraph below to view parts one and two. -Will A couple of weeks ago I and Saina Silverman, late of Edelman and now independent, ...

A quick pointer to Josh's ''Xinjiang: Far West China'' Blog, which has an interesting update on the state of Internet access in Xinjiang. Events of the past few months have pushed Xinjiang out of mind, but it seems the situation there is a ways from what might be considered normal, even in China.

On the sidelines of Ad:Tech Imagethief was cornered for a brief interview by the video sharing service Youku. The results are below. Won't be anything in this brief discussion that my audience doesn't already know, but you can check out the seasonal goatee. No Chinese subtitles, I'm afraid, which may explain why one of the two comments on ...

Dive nerds: This weekend I went with Steven Schwankert of Sinoscuba to dive in the whaleshark tank at Dalian's Tiger Beach Marine Park. Here's a little video of the weekend's fun. It was shot on an iPhone (I didn't really plan on making a video), so please excuse any crappyness. Updates: Somewhat lower-resolution but China-friendly Youku version ...

With everyone else on the planet weighing in on Obama's visit to China last week, I didn't want to miss the party. I wrote a brief article for the website of the magazine Foreign Policy comparing Chinese and American press coverage of the visit. The title and blurb are theirs (the title is much better than mine, but I never used the phrase ...