In Beijing, we talk about air purifiers the way that teen-age boys talk about cars. More than once, I’ve gone into a friend’s apartment and put an admiring hand on a top-of-the-line, IQAir HealthPro, and said, “Niiiice.” (The cost? About nine hundred bucks per room.) At our house we have a lesser brand, and the following will sound like a joke, but I’m sorry to say it’s not: the filters for these machines are so expensive that we get ours under the table, through a connection that my wife has involving a stern Russian woman from Vladivostok. How she gets them, I don’t ask and she doesn’t tell…

Evan Osnos on the record-breaking air pollution in Beijing: http://nyr.kr/TVGfYl

Photograph by ChinaFotoPress/Getty.

The Communist Party of China has, for a brief and fragile moment, transported a city of twenty million people back to a simpler time. It is an exercise in sheer, unrelenting will—physical and mental. This extraordinary production is all to ensure the smooth success of the Eighteenth Party Congress, a period of barely a week, ending this Thursday, when thousands of loyal delegates converge on Beijing to cheer the début of the small, unelected group of men who will run the country for the next ten years. Even to those of us accustomed to the Party’s attention to detail, the effects have been astonishing.

Continue reading “The Communist Party Goes Kodachrome,” by Evan Osnos.

China and the Soviet Union: Evan Osnos on the similarities between the Ferrari crash on March 18th in Beijing and the 1990 Chernigov Incident: http://nyr.kr/PJjSjQ

Exhibit: Coal + Ice

“Coal + Ice” is a documentary exhibition encompassing work by thirty photographers around the world. It seeks to do something unprecedented: to chart the horrific grandeur of our effects on the planet, from the coal mines beneath our feet to the dwindling glaciers on our highest mountains.”

- Evan Osnos on Beijing’s noxious auto emissions and “Coal + Ice,” showing in Beijing through November 28th: http://nyr.kr/s87fiV