Tom Scocca

BEIJING—There was nothing on TV about the election when I got up on Nov. 5, just about the time that the polls were closing in Indiana. I had been looking forward to following the results of an election from the other side of the world--as with the NBA's West Coast games, the important part would play out not in the exhausted hours of late night but in the fat middle of the morning. Everyone back home could spend an agitated useless workday refreshing their browsers and chewing on tentative exit-polling rumors. I would wake up for the fourth quarter, when the action started.  read more »

At brunch time on Aug. 9, less than a day into the Olympics, China was off to a bad start. This was before the murder, even. Outside the 24-hour dim sum restaurant, the air was filthy, as it had been, more often than not, for two weeks. The roadway in front—south of Ditan Park, the ancient Altar of Earth—was being cordoned off for a road-cycling race, in the glare of sunlight through dirty white haze.

The authorities had been blowing smog of their own; local environmental officials and the International Olympic Committee declared that the measured air quality was acceptable and that the press was mistaking normal humid mist for pollution—an old lie, publicly retired by the Chinese government in 2006 and now pressed back into emergency service.  read more »

"Visitors to the Olympics," Charles McGrath writes in today's New York Times, "...can be forgiven for thinking that China is a land of unnatural youthfulness where nobody is older than 30.....Older Chinese, and there are plenty in Beijing, are mostly out of sight."

Are they? As of today, the old people seemed to be exactly where they've been all month: sitting in twos or threes every 50 yards or so along every roadside, all over the city, wearing white Yanjing Beer polo shirts and red armbands. Or manning the sidewalk volunteer information booths in the neighborhoods.

But all McGrath sees is an army of college students, smiling at him in their Olympic-volunteer polo shirts.  read more »

At lunchtime on July 29, the New York Times masthead invited a group of reporters and editors up to a conference room in the paper’s executive hall on the 16th floor to eat roast beef and turkey sandwiches and talk about the paper’s massive investment in the Olympic Games.

How, they wanted to know, could The Times best use the 32 credentialed reporters and editors that would cover the Olympics in China?

George Vecsey, the paper’s longtime sports columnist, answered by not talking about sports at all.

He told the group the real story in Beijing over the coming three weeks was not about athletes, but about China, its geopolitical aspirations and how they were staked on the games.  read more »

BEIJING—The last night of the old, normal life, July 19, was mild and beautiful. The air was clear, even though the Olympic rules would not take effect till the next day: the driving ban on half the city’s three million private cars, alternating daily between odd- and even-numbered license plates; the halt to construction digging and cement pouring. Tomorrow, by plan, the Olympic city would be in place.

I had spent the morning and early afternoon 80-some miles away in Tianjin—the Newark to Beijing’s New York. I had in mind that I would return on the brand-new bullet train, but the bullet train isn’t open to customers yet.  read more »

BEIJING—“Of course, nobody wants to be Samantha,” Eva Shen said. It was a warm Saturday night on Houhai, the lakeside bar strip, and Ms. Shen, 40, had stepped outside the club she co-owns. Over the door, in glowing characters, was the Chinese name of the club, Yuwang Chengshi; above that, in larger letters, was its other name: SEX AND DA CITY.

Ms. Shen spoke English and wore yoga pants, a white T-shirt and flip-flops. (“I do yoga a lot,” she said.) Her hair was reddish and pulled back. Around her, the night was full of women in short-shorts, teetering heels, sparkly things; among the women were all the men looking for women.

Sex and da City opened in 2003, Ms. Shen said. She and about a dozen friends had been out at the World of Suzy Wong Club, and everyone agreed they might as well open a bar of their own. When they convened to discuss the idea again in the daytime, the group had dwindled to five. When it came time to talk about investing money, Ms. Shen said, it was down to four women.  read more »

BEIJING—Down in the basement of Beijing’s celebrated National Stadium, outside the empty press-conference hall, I put my finger on a problem that had been troubling me for a month. I mean this literally. In front of me, plunging at an angle from the ceiling to the floor, was one of the immense, square-sided silvery columns that make up the stadium—a colossal, intricately woven assemblage nicknamed the Bird’s Nest.

This was my second trip to the stadium. I had been reading (and writing) about it from various distances for the past few years, watching the gleaming avant-garde structure gradually rising and being knitted together at the south end of the Olympic green: “a lattice of interwoven steel” (The New York Times); ”a tangle of steel trusses” (The Times); “mesmeric steel frame” (the Guardian); “monumental steel thatching” (me).  read more »

BEIJING—One way to try to envision tens of thousands of dead might be to stand in the midst of tens of thousands of living people. I can’t say how many people were on Tiananmen Square on May 19, mourning the victims of the Sichuan earthquake. I’m usually not bad at crowd counts—cut out a section by eyeball, tally heads, multiply by the space—but the people spreading back from the flagpole on the north end of the square were an indivisible mass. The square is vastly wide and flat, and from down on the ground among them, you couldn’t possible take all the people in, which is probably as good a way as any to stop and think about the earthquake.

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Sixteen different New York Yankees played in a dramatic 4-3 loss to the Cleveland Indians April 26. None of their names were at the top of The New York Times’ game story the next morning. Instead, The Times led with the news that Joba Chamberlain had not appeared.

Ross Ohlendorf, the pitcher who gave up the winning run in the bottom of the ninth, didn’t appear till paragraph three. It took six paragraphs for The Times to mention any of the Cleveland players by name, and nine to identify catcher Victor Martinez as the one who got the hit.  read more »

The New York Times under executive editor Bill Keller still has fewer Pulitzer victories to its credit than during the short-lived reign of his predecessor, Howell Raines.

Under Raines, who served approximately 21 months before resigning in 2003 in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, the paper's news pages published seven Pulitzer-winning entries.

In more than twice that span of time—53 Pulitzer-eligible months as executive editor—Keller has published six Pulitzer winners.  read more »

BEIJING—March 15 was what people conventionally call a great day for a ball game. A right-handed pull hitter might have disagreed, feeling the strong breeze coming in from the northwest. It was certainly a kind day for red flags, at least in Beijing. Along Chang'an Boulevard, by Tian'anmen Square and the Great Hall of the People, the national flags and accompanying plain red ones stood rippling off their flagpoles, aglow in clear sunlight against the blue sky.

From the other side of the country, in Lhasa, there were reports of flag burnings—and other things burning. It was unclear. The Internet was clogged. YouTube was blocked, and its Chinese counterpart, Tudou, had suddenly announced it was shutting down to work on its servers.  read more »

BEIJING -- When an employee of Rupert Murdoch begins badgering someone about cozying up to the Chinese regime, it's clear that the People's Republic is having a public-relations crisis.

"Spielberg said, 'No, I'm not going to go,'" a reporter said, thrusting a Fox News microphone at British filmmaker Daryl Goodrich on Feb. 23.

Eleven days earlier, Steven Spielberg had publicly announced he was quitting as an artistic consultant to the Beijing Olympics. So why, the Fox man demanded, had Goodrich said yes?  read more »

“I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country,” Al Gore said on December 13, 2000.

Well, George W. Bush didn’t listen to Al Gore’s advice, and neither so much did God. But Ralph Nader evidently took it as holy writ.  read more »

If David Simon is Captain Ahab, then call me Ishmael. Mr. Simon, the newspaper-reporter-turned-television-producer, stands accused of unhealthy obsession because he is using the current season of The Wire to revisit his old workplace, The Baltimore Sun.  read more »

BEIJING—“I think it’s actually surprisingly easy for Americans to come here and feel like they can fit in,” Joseph Kahn said, sitting in a coffee shop called Sequoia, a block north of the gate of the Jian Guo Men Diplomatic Compound. It was late December, and Mr. Kahn was nearing the end of his Pulitzer-winning tour of duty as The New York Times’ Beijing bureau chief. On Dec. 31, The Times named him deputy foreign editor, a job that will require him to relocate to New York.

The first time Mr. Kahn was sent home from Beijing as a reporter was in 1989. When the Tiananmen Square protests began, he was in Hong Kong, doing graduate work in East Asian studies. Mr. Kahn entered the mainland on a tourist visa and began working as a stringer for The Dallas Morning News. After the crackdown, the authorities revoked his visa and ordered him out of the country within 72 hours.  read more »

Cal’s mission for America meets Olympian bureaucracy in Beijing.  read more »

Covering the rush to prepare for the Olympics in Beijing, this reporter inadvertently became a mascot for China's new spirit of cooperation with journalists.  read more »

As a loyal American, I find myself ever more worried about the fate of electrical lighting. By electrical lighting, I mean incandescent. There are other kinds of lamps that run on electricity, but they count as lighting only in the same sense that brown rice counts as food—only if someone morbidly insists on it, and no one else has the heart to argue.  read more »