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People of different shapes are together, and the shadows are fused together, make no distinction between what's one's own and what's another's.

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Comprehension Questions - When It Comes to Our Lives on Social Media, 'There's Always Another Story' -- Xiaoyu Xu

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When It Comes to Our Lives on Social Media 'There's Always Another Story' -- Xiaoyu Xu

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Have you ever looked at a friend's posts on Facebook or Instagram and wondered what's really going on in that person's life? Is it really all delicious meals and adorable kids and fabulous trips overseas, or is there more happening beneath the surface?

For a long time, Rachel Leonard felt pressure to post only positive news about her life. Even photos of the view from her front porch were carefully edited before she shared them.

"If you looked only straight you could see mountains," she said. "If you looked to the left you'd see a factory, but of course I didn't take pictures of the factory, because why would you do that?"

Plenty of us follow a similar strategy on social media. Posts about engagements and babies will receive ravenous applause. News about a grandparent passing away will elicit virtual hugs. But fears about not making rent? Marital tensions? Hesitations about becoming a parent? Those sorts of posts - posts that show ambivalence - are verboten.

It turns out, all our social media curation is having an effect - both on the people sharing these posts, and on those reading them. Many studies have shown that people who use social media frequently appear to be unhappier than those who don't.

But until recently, it was impossible to say whether this was correlation or causation. Do lonely people spend more time on social media in an effort to escape their loneliness? Or is social media itself causing people to feel isolated?

A recent study at Tel Aviv University has provided what may be the first experiment to sort out causation from correlation.

This week, we'll learn the results of that study and others exploring how social media can shape the way we view our friends' lives, and our own.
Hidden Brain is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Maggie Penman, Jennifer Schmidt, Rhaina Cohen, and Renee Klahr, and Chloe Connelly. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain, and listen for Hidden Brain stories each week on your local public radio station.

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When It Comes To Our Lives On Social Media, 'There's Always Another Story'

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subscribe to Hidden Brain podcast Have you ever looked at a friend's posts on Facebook or Instagram and wondered what's really going on in that person's life? Is it really all delicious meals and adorable kids and fabulous trips overseas, or is there more happening beneath the surface?

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Anthony Appiah Interview - Vocabulary and Comprehension Activity -- Xiaoyu Xu-1

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Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters.

At a time when talk of a "clash of civilizations" looks increasingly like a self-fulfilling prophecy, when bin Laden-ites seek to reshape the world in the image of universal Islam, when our own leaders blithely hive off the good from the evil, us from them, Anthony Appiah issues a call for a more helpful posture toward a world of stubborn difference, an approach he calls, reaching back to the 4th Century Greece, "cosmopolitanism."

The cosmopolitan ethic starts from the thought that human knowledge is fallible-that no culture or individual has a lock on truth-and upholds "conversation," broadly defined as the respectful and candid exchange of views among individuals and cultures-as a good in its own right; agreement is not its ultimate goal. It understands individuals in the context of their cultures but tends, where the two clash, to give primacy to the former. What cosmopolitanism does not permit, however, is a kind of flaccid relativism; it insists that there are some universals-basic human rights, for instance-which are non-negotiable. Otherwise, it says, difference and disagreement are so much grist for mutually enriching dialogue.

Cosmopolitanism is a title in the "Issues of Our Time" series from W.W. Norton, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., in which big-name intellectuals tackle important contemporary themes. (The series launched with, in addition to Appiah's, books by Amartya Sen and Alan Dershowitz.)

Kwame Anthony Appiah, who was raised in Ghana and educated in England, is professor of philosophy at Princeton University. His books include In My Father's House, Thinking It Through, and The Ethics of Identity. He's the editor, with Henry Louis Gates Jr., of Africana.

Mother Jones: "Cosmopolitan" is a word with a certain pedigree, a certain amount of baggage, so let's start by defining terms.

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Sure. The word comes from a Greek phrase, which means "citizen of the world." The first person we know to have used the word about himself was Diogenes the Cynic in the 4th Century BC. It was a metaphor then and still is. It's been attacked from both the left and the right. From the right, as you know, it was used as a term of anti-Semitic abuse, and their point was that people who had a sense of responsibility to the human community as a whole were going to be bad nationalists, bad patriots. The other direction of attack, from the left, was that cosmopolitanism was something very elitist. It came to mean a kind of free-floating attitude of the rich person who can afford to travel all over the world tasting a little bit of this culture and that one and not being very responsible about any of it.

I don't think that cosmopolitanism has to be either elitist or unpatriotic; I think it's perfectly possible to combine a sense of real responsibility for other human beings as human beings with a deeper sense of commitment to a political community. As far as I'm concerned, the key things in cosmopolitanism are, first, that global concern-the acceptance that we're all responsible for the human community, which is the fundamental idea of morality. What's distinctive about the cosmopolitan attitude is that it comes with a recognition that encounters with other people aren't about making them like us. Cosmopolitans accept and indeed like the fact that people live in different ways; that free human beings will choose to live in different ways and will choose to express themselves in different ways. And that openness to difference comes, I think, from a kind of toleration combined with a recognition of human fallibility. One of the reasons why we're glad there are people out there who aren't like us is that we're pretty certain that there are a lot of things we're wrong about.

MJ: So the goal isn't to have everybody agree.

KAA: Absolutely not. It's not evangelical. You enter a conversation, and conversation is about listening as well as talking; it's about being open to being changed yourself, but it's not about expecting consensus or seeking agreement. You can seek understanding without seeking agreement.

MJ: Sounds like a sort of relativism.

KAA: Well, there's a certain truth to the relativist view, which is that very often when people evaluate other people and other societies they haven't the slightest idea what they're talking about. You can't make a sensible evaluation of, say, the Turkish university regulation about the wearing of headscarves if you haven't the faintest idea of the historical context or the meaning of that practice. Blithely wading in and saying whatever you want to say about it without that knowledge is just silly, and it's wrong. If you're going to have a productive cross-cultural conversation, or, within a society, a cross-identity conversation, you've got to listen and understand what you're evaluating.

MJ: And not to seek to impose values on others.

KAA: Not at all. The world is full of people trying to make everybody else like themselves. Mormons, Catholics, Wahhabi Muslims. I happen to prefer them in this order: Catholicism, Mormonism, Wahhabism; but that's not important here. What's important is that they share a problem, which is that they're not open, in their standard forms, to the second element that cosmopolitanism depends upon, which is that it's okay for people to be different. Now, just to be clear, there are forms of Islam, for example, that are open to that form of cosmopolitanism. I'm not objecting to religion, because I don't think religion has to be universalist.

There are two strands to cosmpolitanism, and both are essential. The first is universalist: it says everybody matters. But they matter in their specificity, as who they are, not who you want them to be. The problem is that there are people going around who want to reshape the world, want to reshape everybody else, in their own image. That's dangerous. Some of them are more violent than others; some aren't violent at all. But none of them are cosmopolitan, and in that sense I'm against them.

MJ: But aren't there some things that we do want to universalize, right? Like basic human rights.

KAA: Yes, and the challenge is to identify those things. I would say the cosmopolitan view about that has to be that nobody can decide that by himself or herself; we have to engage in a global conversation in order to create instruments, like the human rights instruments of the United Nations, that are the product of a dialogue among nations and across civilizations. Now, we might disagree on what those things we want to universalize. I have no objection, for instance, to the Catholic claim to know what the universals are. They're entitled to their claim; what they're not entitled to do is impose these things without negotiation.

MJ: But, again, from the cosmopolitan point of view some things are not negotiable.

KAA: That's right, because cosmopolitanism starts from the core thought that everybody matters. Each person is entitled, in the context of his or her community, to seek a life of significance and dignity. Well, that sets a boundary on tolerance, because you can't tolerate those who actively prevent people from doing that. So cosmopolitans have to be hard-line about that; they can't be tolerant of people, say, who think that torture is just fine, or that it doesn't matter what a woman wants-if a male member of her family wants her to marry someone that's the way it's going to be.

You want to converse with anyone who's conversible. So the mere fact that somebody has an illiberal thought or idea isn't a reason for not talking to them. The liberal tradition is one in which even intolerant speech and thought is permitted until it crosses a boundary to intolerant or dangerous acts, or threatens to. At that point you have to take sides. And in many cases it's easy for me to know which side I'm on.

Now, of course there are going to be cases where we differ about whether a boundary is being crossed, but my view is that if you think the boundary is being crossed and you've made a serious effort to understand what the other person is doing then you're entitled to stop the conversation and start trying to get something done.

MJ: Okay, so let's apply this frame to the row over these Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

KAA: Well, I think that representing the prophet Mohammed in the way that they did is genuinely insulting, and it's not the sort of thing that a person who cared about cross-cultural communication would do. It's perfectly fine to say that of course people have the right to do this-of course they do-but they shouldn't be surprised if it upsets people. And the corollary is that the upset people have a right to express their upset-again, so long as it doesn't cross that boundary I mentioned.

On the other hand, carefully phrased criticisms of, say, the fact that women aren't allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, seem to me very much on the agenda. And I don't think we should be troubled by the fact that some people in Saudi Arabia will say, What business is it of yours? A deep part of cosmopolitanism is an engagement with making the world a place in which everybody has, as a baseline, the resources to live a life of dignity and significance. It seems to me perfectly fair to point out that that standard is not met in Saudi Arabia, not only in respect to gender but in respect to lots of things, as of course it isn't fully met in the United States.

If we have a cosmopolitan conversation one of the things that will come out of it is, for instance, how many Europeans find it morally astonishing that the United States tolerate the level of racial inequality that it does, and that our prisons fall way below what anyone in Europe would take to be appropriate human rights minimums. The fact that, in the United States, the attitudes of white people and black people toward these questions is so different suggests that there isn't an adequate conversation going on. If it's a conversation, that's part of what we should expect to hear, and I would have thought we would be enriched by it as it will make us think about things we need to think about.

MJ: How does the cosmopolitan balance regard for the individual with consideration for the community?

KAA: Well, the deeply liberal view-and this has been the project of much of my recent work-takes the central question of ethics to be the shaping of the social world in order to give each person the chance to make a life of significance to himself or herself. And it takes things like identities and nations as valuable to the extent that they contribute to that, but not as valuable in themselves.

MJ: In light of that, how should we think about identity politics, which put such a high value on membership of a group?

KAA: Well, there are limits to identity politics, of course. Identity can be an instrument of individuality, but when it's invoked to constrain or resist individuality it's usually bad. But you can't responsibly talk about identity politics without taking into account that it arose in response to genuine injustices, and that it was helpful, in the first instance, in response to those injustices, around gender, race, sexual orientation, religion. It's a way of coming together as a way to establish a sense of self-respect. So, there's a good side to it.

Also, when people on the right criticize identity politics they tend to forget that one of the most vigorous and effective forms of identity politics by far is nationalism, and many people on the right are nationalist. Now, I've nothing against nationalism as such; I think there's good nationalism and bad nationalism. But to object to the very idea of caring about identity as a political matter would rule our nationalism.

However, if you're a cosmopolitan you understand that it's important not to be captured by any one identity and not to feel that because you don' t have identity as a basis for communicating with other people that you shouldn't communicate with them. We have lots to share and gain from one another, whether we have exchanges based on shared identity or based on the fact that we have different identities. Another problem is that often identity politics looks like asking for symbolic acknowledgments when what's actually needed is readjustments of power and money. Turns out, it's relatively easy to get a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, but much harder to abolish racial discrimination in employment.

MJ: You argue in the book that one of the standard criticisms of economic globalization-that it threatens the survival of "authentic" local culture-is misplaced, precisely because such a view implicitly sets a higher value on the group (the cultural community) than the individual.

KAA: Well, first of all, once you start out on the cosmopolitan exploration, one of the things that's bound to strike you is that among the most interesting civilizations that the planet has produced, hardly any have produced what's interesting about them by themselves. Think of the places we think of historically as great centers of civilization-Mogul India, Venice in the Renaissance, Greece in the 5th Century BC, London in the 19th Century-they all borrow; and this is what people do, they borrow, they exchange, that's how cultures work. Often when people talk about things that are supposedly "authentically" this or that-what could be more authentically Italian than spaghetti, say; except that the Chinese invented it. What could be more authentically American than jazz, which in fact comes out of a city that was black and Irish and Latin and French? You can go on all day. So the first thing to say about the apostles of purity is-what are they talking about?

Now, the people who make these arguments are responding to a genuine problem, which is that there are places where people who want to go on with certain practices are prevented from doing so by force. Tibet is a perfect contemporary example. A historical example is the eradication the traditional religions of Latin America by the Spanish. That's terrible. And yet, if everyone in Latin America had consented to become a Catholic, then who would be against it?

The other genuine problem is that there's often a kind of crowding out because the things some people would like to continue with become expensive relative to things from other places. The proportion of people in my home town in Ghana who still wear what we call a cloth, which is a sort of toga, has noticeably declined in my lifetime, and it's because t-shirts and shorts are cheaper. We're not a particularly poor place, so there are people who still wear the cloth, particularly on certain formal occasions, because they can afford it. If they stopped wearing it because they couldn't afford it, that would be very sad, because they wouldn't be able to do what they wanted to do, not-again-because the culture was changing. But even then, the solution isn't to force them to wear the cloth no matter what, but to change the world economy so that they can afford to wear it.

MJ: Isn't another problem that the global cultural exchange is lopsided-that the rest of the world gets American cultural products, but the US doesn't get much of anyone else's

Well, that's a problem for us -that's to say, we miss out. Remember, though, that, if you take the example of movies, while it's true that not many movies from elsewhere gain real traction in the United States, especially if they're not in English, nevertheless more movies from India, or Turkey, or Hong Kong are watched in much of Asia and Africa than are movies from Hollywood. Nigerian films-they call it "Nollywood"-are very big in West Africa. Because of new technology it's much cheaper than it used to be to make and distribute films. So there are lots of exciting things happening in the world that the United States is depriving itself of, and it does so at its own cost.

The cost to other people is that because of the great penetration of especially American culture, they have a little bit better sense of what we're like than they do of what we're like. That's a problem for them, because we're busy reshaping the world. And if you're doing that the very least you ought to do is know the contours of what you're reshaping, and we don't. It's also a problem for us, because they notice our lack of interest and they resent it, and that's the kind of attitude that, at the extreme, turns Osama bin Laden into somebody's hero.

MJ: You also argue in the book that when people complain about American-led globalization making the world "homogenous" they're overstating things.

KAA: Yes. The world is full of people consuming things we know nothing about here. And anyway, even if they were (God forbid) force-fed a diet of American television they'd interpret it in their own context. They literally wouldn't see what you see. There are famous studies-I mention two of them in my book-that show this. People tend to borrow the things they find useful and ignore the rest. They interpret and respond; they're not a wax on which you're imprinting an image. People even interpret plot in their own cultural context. There are these famous studies of the reception of the American television series Dallas in Israel and Palestine. They talk about a moment when a female character leaves her home and goes to stay with an older man. They saw her going back to her father. In fact he's her boyfriend, but in that world that would never be. They saw her doing what they would do in like circumstances. When you send a television series to Ghana or Mexico or South Africa you don't send a guy with it to interpret it; people interpret it for themselves.

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Cosmopolitanism: How To Be a Citizen of the World

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Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters.

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I Am Yup'ik Comprehension Questions -- Xiaoyu Xu

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Sign up or log in to save your favorite stories and lessons, create custom collections, and share with others.

I Am Yup'ik tells the story of a 16-year-old Alaskan Native, Byron Nicholai, who leaves his tiny village to compete in a basketball tournament hundreds of miles across frozen tundra. Byron leads his village to a championship in the district tournament, which ultimately unites the Toksook Bay community and creates hope throughout the team, family members, and the community-at-large.

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Sign up or log in to save your favorite stories and lessons, create custom collections, and share with others. I Am Yup'ik tells the story of a 16-year-old Alaskan Native, Byron Nicholai, who leaves his tiny village to compete in a basketball tournament hundreds of miles across frozen tundra.

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Yo-Yo Ma - Comprehension Questions -- Xiaoyu Xu

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Yo-Yo Ma reflects on the role of arts, creativity and the edges of life. His comments are adapted from a conversation with WorldPost.
In our highly interdependent global civilization, a lot of things are not working.

When I travel around the country and the world to perform, I pick up in my many conversations a growing sense that the first Enlightenment -- which posited the rule of reason over emotion and feelings -- is getting a little creaky, confining and even counterproductive.

The neurobiologist Antonio Damasio has written about Descartes' error that, to put it in shorthand, "I think therefore I am." Damasio instead makes the compelling argument, empirically based in neurology, that feeling and emotions as expressed in art and music play a central role in high-level cognitive reasoning.

Advances in neurobiology now make it clear that we humans have dual neural pathways, one for critical thinking and one for empathetic thinking. Only one pathway can be activated at a time, so when one is on, the other is off. Yet we are also aware that wise and balanced judgment results from integrating the critical and empathetic, taking emotions as well as reason into account. While this can't be done it tandem, it does occur, we now know, through a loop-back process of layers of feedback.

These discoveries suggest that a new way of thinking is possible, a new consciousness -- perhaps a new Enlightenment -- that brings the arts and science back together.

This new consciousness by which we purposely seek to bolster the integrative feed-back loops of our dual neural pathways could provide a new energy for creativity in our weary civilization.

This integrative awareness is especially important today as our science-driven, technologically advanced world is breaking down into ever more compartments, specializations and disciplines -- even as the interdependence of globalization is creating more links with other cultures through which empathetic understanding is vital.

To be able to put oneself in another's shoes without prejudgment is an essential skill. Empathy comes when you understand something deeply through arts and literature and can thus make unexpected connections. These parallels bring you closer to things that would otherwise seem far away. Empathy is the ultimate quality that acknowledges our identity as members of one human family.

Visionaries like Elon Musk have spoken of the Internet and the planetary reach of the media as a "global thinking circuit." We need to be sure that this connecting circuit is about communication and not just information by fostering both empathetic and critical thinking.

Because the world economy is so hyper-competitive, much of the focus in education these days from Singapore to Shanghai to American schools is on STEM -- science, technology, engineering and math. As important as that is, it is short-sighted. We need to add the empathetic reasoning of the arts to the mix -- STEAM.

The values behind arts integration -- collaboration, flexible thinking and disciplined imagination -- lead to the capacity to innovate. A pianist skilled to both read and improvise music is open to listening to what is around him but knows that, to reach excellence, he needs to filter the imagination through the discipline of knowledge. When he performs, you will know instantly if he has achieved that right balance and it works or not.

For me the most proficient way to teach the values of collaboration, flexibility, imagination and innovation -- all skill sets needed in today's world -- is through the performing arts. If you have these tools, you can do well in any field from software engineering to the biosciences.

Empathy is the other key tool. Empathy and imagination, the artificial layering of different realities, are linked. Empathy is your capacity to imagine what someone else is going through; what they are thinking, feeling and perceiving. That will not only give you an outlook on who they are -- continually corrected by evidence -- but also what your alternative possibilities are.

Empathetic thinking is something that is severely missing in education today that is only STEM oriented. Everyone wants innovation, recovering that inspired and innovative spirit of JFK talking about going to the moon. But you can't skim the top without the rest of it.

The arts teach us that there is something that connects us all and is bigger than each of us. In both places it is a matter of equilibrium, of centering the ego at the right point of balance between the individual and the community.

We are all addressing the same issues with different names attached to them.

STEAM will help us get there by resolving the education problem. Kids will then go to school because it is a passion and a privilege, not a requirement.
IT'S ALL ABOUT EQUILIBRIUM
Finding meaning and living -- all of what we do as humans in society -- occurs in that brain space between life and death. In our industrial societies there is a great deal of controversy these days over what life is and when it begins and how we approach the agony of death which, in industrial society, we try to avoid thinking about. Therefore we spend an unbelievable amount of money on medical care in those last few years before dying.

The arts help us cope with these issues by engaging, not avoiding, the deep emotions of intimate loss involved and retelling over and over again the story of the human condition and its limits. Only then can we can regain our spiritual balance and find meaning in more than trying to technically manage every aspect of our being from womb to tomb.

Equilibrium is what all life forms are seeking in order to survive. Evolution is the balance between stability and the changes necessary to cope with new challenges in the environment.

On this earth we can only survive within a very narrow bandwidth of conditions -- oxygen, hydrogen, light, acidity, temperature.

Within that narrow bandwidth, most of what exists is concentrated in the middle. But, as we see in ecology, there are also "necessary edges." The "edge effect" in ecology occurs at the border where two ecosystems -- for example the savannah and forest -- meet. At that interface, where there is the least density and the greatest diversity of life forms, each living thing can draw from the core of the two ecosystems. That is where new life forms emerge.

In our advanced species, we also have these "necessary edges." The hard sciences are probing one far end of the bandwidth, searching for the origins of the universe or the secrets of the genome. People in the arts are probing the other far end of the bandwidth. Without the "necessary edges" that interface with a changing environment and find innovative response, the middle will go over the edge like lemmings. Those on the edge are, in effect, the scouts that say "there is a waterfall, there is a ledge, there is danger ahead. Stop. Don't go this way, go that way."

Equilibrium occurs when the information from the edges is available at the core. Only when those meridians or pathways that connect the edges to the middle are open will a life-form survive, and even prosper. Only when science and the arts, critical and empathetic reasoning, are linked to the mainstream will we find a sustainable balance in society.

What is dangerous is when the center ignores the edges or the edges ignore the center -- art for arts sake or science without a humanist and societal perspective. Then we are headed for doomsday without knowing it.
GLOBALIZATION CREATES CULTURE
My musical journeys have reinforced this point of view. What I've found is that the interactions brought about by globalization don't just destroy culture; they can create new culture and invigorate and spread traditions that have existed for ages precisely because of the "edge effect." Sometimes the most interesting things happen at the edge. The intersections there can reveal unexpected connections.

Culture is a fabric composed of gifts from every corner of the world. One way of discovering the world is by digging deeply into its traditions.

I have often used this example: At the core of any cellist's repertoire are the Cello Suites by Bach. At the heart of each suite is a dance movement called the sarabande.

The dance originated with music of the North African Berbers, where it was a slow, sensual dance. It next appeared in Spain, where it was banned because it was considered lewd and lascivious. Spaniards brought it to the Americas, but it also traveled on to France, where it became a courtly dance. In the 1720s, Bach incorporated the sarabande as a movement in his Cello Suites. Today, I play Bach, a Paris-born American musician of Chinese parentage. So who really owns the sarabande? Each culture has adopted the music, investing it with specific meaning, but each culture must share ownership: it belongs to us all.

In 1998, I founded the Silk Road Project to study the flow of ideas among the many cultures between the Mediterranean and the Pacific over several thousand years. When the Silk Road Ensemble performs, we try to bring much of the world together on one stage. Its members are a peer group of virtuosos, masters of living traditions, whether European, Arabic, Azeri, Armenian, Persian, Russian, Central Asian, Indian, Mongolian, Chinese, Korean or Japanese. They all generously share their knowledge and are curious and eager to learn about other forms of expression.

Over the last several years, we have found that every tradition is the result of successful invention. One of the best ways to ensure the survival of traditions is by organic evolution, using all the tools available to us in the present day, from YouTube to the concert hall.
WE ARE MORE THAN WE CAN MEASURE
We live in such a measuring society, people tend to put a person in a box they can put on their mental shelf. People think of me as a cellist because they can see my performances and take my measure as a musician. I think of my life as a musician as only the tip of an iceberg. That is only the audible part of my existence. Underneath the water is the life I'm leading, the thoughts I'm thinking and the emotions that well up in me.

We all get into trouble if we think the universe only exists of the matter that we can see and measure, and not the anti-matter that is the counterpart that holds it all together.

Michelangelo famously said, "I liberate the statue from the marble." Similarly, my music emerges from the life all around me and the world we all share together. One is the condition of the other.

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Yo-Yo Ma reflects on the role of arts, creativity and the edges of life. His comments are adapted from a conversation with WorldPost. In our highly interdependent global civilization, a lot of things are not working.

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Beijing Documentary Analysis -- Xiaoyu Xu

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Season 10 Episode 2 | 55m 1s |

Amid Beijing's dizzying economic, urban, and cultural transformation, five artists respond to the region's relentless evolution with urgency and ambition, all the while contending with many centuries of Chinese cultural traditions. Featuring artists Guan Xiao, Liu Xiaodong, Song Dong, Xu Bing, and Yin Xiuzhen.

Aired: 09/25/20

Rating: NR

Problems Playing Video? Report a Problem |

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Season 10 Episode 2 | 55m 1s | Amid Beijing's dizzying economic, urban, and cultural transformation, five artists respond to the region's relentless evolution with urgency and ambition, all the while contending with many centuries of Chinese cultural traditions. Featuring artists Guan Xiao, Liu Xiaodong, Song Dong, Xu Bing, and Yin Xiuzhen.

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How do innovative communication technologies impact our ability to connect with each other, and to understand our global community?

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What is the role of art in our global community?

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How does our community shape our understanding of the world?

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Who am I

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Mid-Semester Reflection

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Final Reflection - "Every Ending is a New Beginning"