China is educating engineers around the world | If You Ever Speak in Public, Follow This Advice | Rock and Roll and Elder Care in "Goldie" | The Fight Against Climate Change Returns to the Streets

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China is educating engineers around the world - The Economist

Chinese officials often talk of the Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure building spree, in hyperbolic terms. On October 17th and 18th Xi Jinping, China’s leader, hosted a big summit in Beijing to celebrate the tenth anniversary of what the government likes to call the “project of the century”. Lately this hype has masked an awkward reality. Since 2020 China has scaled back the scheme as governments have found it harder to repay Chinese infrastructure loans.

Yet in recent years one part of the project has stood out as a quiet success. Since 2016 China has set up some 27 vocational colleges in two dozen countries, mostly poorer ones. These “Luban Workshops” (named after a fabled carpenter from the fifth century BC) have trained thousands of students in fields including artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, railway operations and robotics. One of the newest workshops opened on September 4th at Meru University of Science and Technology in Kenya.

The purpose is not charity. Luban workshops promote technology and standards that China wants to export to developing countries. Gear for the new workshop in Kenya will come from Huawei, a Chinese telecoms giant America would like to see excluded from its allies’ mobile networks, for fear its kit could assist Chinese spying. Huawei (which denies America’s allegations) helped build Kenya’s mobile network and is now working with its biggest telecoms provider to roll out 5G services.

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If You Ever Speak in Public, Follow This Advice - The Atlantic

Most life advice is terrible. Don’t sweat the small stuff—if I knew which stuff that was, I wouldn’t be sweating so much. Know thyself—thank you, but myself is the main thing I think about already. Live every day as if it were your last—so I guess I should spend every day Googling which coffin best between bouts of weeping?

Any exhortation that gets broadcast to all of humanity will end up seeming meaningless, trite, or wrong. Some people need to sweat the small stuff less, yes. But I’m always forgetting to respond to text messages, or leaving the house with my fly undone, or developing mysterious headaches only to realize I haven’t drunk any water all day. Perhaps I ought to sweat the small stuff more.

I still believe that it’s possible to construct a piece of advice that’s useful to just about anyone, even strangers. But it’s difficult, because that advice has to have three elements that rarely go together: It must be nonobvious, broadly applicable, and harmful to no one.

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Rock and Roll and Elder Care in “Goldie” - The New Yorker

For forty years, Tim Goldrainer has been the front man and lead singer of the Menus, a popular rock-and-roll cover band based in Cincinnati, Ohio, taking the stage dressed in unorthodox silhouettes and every color of the rainbow. When the documentary filmmaker Billy Miossi saw Goldrainer perform at a local festival, several years ago, he was "not prepared" for what he saw. Goldrainer, or Goldie, as he is affectionately known, gave an especially energized performance, "doing the splits and kicking balloons, constantly doing costume changes." Soon thereafter, Miossi found out that, starting in 2015, Goldrainer had taken on another kind of gigâone to which the singer brings the same commitment but plays in a very different setting. Miossi's film "Goldie" shows Goldrainer giving concerts in local nursing homes.

Miossi was taken by the idea of such a wild, exuberant performer spending time in front of much smaller, quieter audiences. He tracked Goldrainer down after the festival and learned that the singer lived in a house behind his own. "He just walked through my back yard, and he was at my front door in, like, five minutes," the filmmaker said. Before long, Miossi attended his first Goldie show, as Goldrainer's nursing home performances are known. "When he starts, the audience is sort of unsure, like, 'What is he doing?' He's joking with them and he really interacts," Miossi said, but "he gets up close and sings," and soon they're hooked.

In Miossi's film, Goldrainer walks into one facility where he's going to put on a Goldie show, and a woman working at the front desk announces that she has a bone to pick with him, because he's made her mother, who is cared for at a different living facility, fall in love with him. It's easy to see how this might happen. Goldrainer doesn't dip into his trove of whimsical costumes for his Goldie showsâhe doesn't need to. In a sequence of scenes, Goldrainer is shown restlessly hopping around, playfully dancing with the seniors in his audiences as if he's trying to stir up a whirlwind of energy solely to animate them. Later on, as he sings the lyrics to Benny Bell's "Shaving Cream," he prompts some childish giggles when he improvises a punch line at the end of the song.

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The Fight Against Climate Change Returns to the Streets - The New Yorker

Keeping movements alive is hard work—they run on volunteer energy, and they can be derailed by too much success, too much failure, too much internal strife, too many competing interests. Or they can be hindered by a pandemic, which largely brought the climate movement to a halt just months after its biggest single day, in September of 2019, when millions of people around the world, most of them young, took to the streets; in New York City, according to organizers, a quarter million of them joined the then sixteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg down at the Battery.

Sunday’s March to End Fossil Fuels was not as big—Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in a rousing wrap-up speech at the end of the day, estimated the crowd at between fifty and seventy thousand people, the organizers said seventy-five thousand, and the Times went with “tens of thousands.” But that didn’t matter—the march was considerably larger than organizers had expected, and represented a real return to the streets for climate campaigners. I wandered back and forth along the line of march, which went from Broadway in the fifties crosstown to First Avenue, near the United Nations; the sun was bright, spirits were high, and the signs were clever. (“Leonardo DiCaprio’s Girlfriends Deserve a Future.”)

I knew many of the people leading the parade: Third Act, the progressive group for people over sixty that I helped found, sent chapters from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and across New York; and there were such veteran organizers as the Reverend Lennox Yearwood, of the Hip Hop Caucus, and Naomi Klein, who took time off from her book tour for the newly released “Doppelganger” to attend. Clearly, the climate movement, led by Indigenous groups and frontline communities, has come through the past few years intact; enormous credit is due to the organizers, including Jean Su, of the national N.G.O. the Center for Biological Diversity (“Our Mission: Saving Life on Earth”), who pulled together a major march in a matter of months.

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