How do I see the video/hear the audio? There are two ways to experience the multimedia content on this site:
What is a podcast? Podcasting is a method of distributing multimedia content over the web. When you use a program called a "podcatcher" to subscribe to a podcast, the podcatcher will periodically check to see if new content (in this case, audio or video files) has been added to the podcast. If new content is available, the podcatcher will automatically download the new file(s) for you, making them available to play on your computer, iPod, or other digital media device.
What do these buttons mean?
will take you to a page that will allow you to subscribe via one of several different podcatchers. You can also right-click (control-click for Mac) and copy the address into the podcatcher of your choice.
will allow you to subscribe to the podcast via the iTunes music store, if that is your preferred podcatcher. It's free to subscribe and download podcasts from iTunes, but you have to have iTunes installed on your computer (download it now).
Still confused? The University has posted information about RSS, the technology behind podcasting as well as information about subscribing to RSS feeds. If you want to learn more, you can also read Wikipedia's article on podcasting.
More questions? Please e-mail chiasmos@uchicago.edu.
"China's Brave New World and Other Tales for Global Times"
November 15, 2007
A talk by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.
If Chairman Mao came back to life today, what would he think of Nanjing's bookstore, the "Librairie Avant-Garde", where it is easier to find primers on Michel Foucault's philosophy than copies of the Little Red Book? What does it really mean to order a latte at Starbucks in Beijing? Is it possible that Aldous Huxley wrote a novel even more useful than Orwell's 1984 for making sense of post-Tiananmen China...or post-9/11 America? In these often playful, always enlightening "tales", Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom poses these and other questions as he journeys from 19th-century China into the future, and from Shanghai to Chicago, St. Louis, and Budapest. He argues that simplistic views of China and Americanization found in most soundbite-driven media reports serve us poorly as we try to understand China's place in the current world order...or our own.
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom's other books include Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai. He lives in Irvine, California.
From the World Beyond the Headlines series.