Happy new year and welcome to the first session of 2022! Our regular attendees will know that 2022 kicks off UNESCO’s Decade of Indigenous Languages, and we’ll have a look at highlights from Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine’s write-up on making the most of the Decade of Indigenous Languages for Indigenous communities as well have a…
This week we’ll have a special Arts & Entertainment edition to discuss just some of the many interesting geocultural news items in that industry. But first things first, the big news is Microsoft’s announcement that it will pull LinkedIn from the Chinese market citing ‘challenging operating’ climate. In a similar move, Harvard is moving a top…
After 20 years, the US has withdrawn from Afghanistan and the Taliban has taken back control of the country. Obviously, this is a huge and heavy topic with the ensuing panic and humanitarian crisis in the country. We’ll have an open discussion of what this means for the world and the future of the country…
After a few weeks of detouring to other topics, we’re back to our favorite topic this week: China. We’ll look at China’s plan to create a karaoke blacklist, banning songs that are out of tune with the party line (Ain’t no party like the communist party…) and then study the Chinese crackdown on private tutoring…
Just when you think it’s a slow news fortnight, you have to make major cuts to a number of very interesting topics, and the agenda still seems to be way too packed! This week (as many others) we’ll turn our regards toward China and Hollywood, starting with John Cena’s apology—in Mandarin nonetheless—to China for saying…