last week, I decided to check out the new pedestrian area of times square. it’s a public space experiment running until the end of the year, when the city decides whether or not to make the change permanent.
I had expected the entire area to be completely pedestrian, but traffic is still allowed to go cross-town: only Broadway is closed off, from 42nd to 47th street. so as I walked northward I still had to be aware of traffic crossings, but I could walk on the street instead of being confined …

the best food I’ve had in NYC was in a Flushing food court.
actually, the term ‘food court’ is misleading. it’s more like a collection of half a dozen Chinese food stalls in the basement of a place called Golden Mall (also a misnomer because the ‘mall’ appears to consist entirely of this basement).

after hmm-ing and haw-ing awhile between the different

Chinese officials are demolishing Kashgar’s Old City to prevent calamity in case of earthquake in this tremor-prone region of Xinjiang.
To give some perspective on this project, many of the 13,000 families who live in the city belong to the Uighur ethnic minority, a people who–like the Tibetans to the South–have in the past been targets of clampdowns by the Chinese government, fearing their separation from the country. (Kashgar lies on the western border of Xinjiang province, which is technically an Autonomous Region of the PRC.)
Similar to the face-lift done for …

good article in newsweek about the changing attitudes in iran today (also accompanied by photos the journalist took of random different people, to show a cross-section of the population).

my boyfriend’s parents were in town recently, which was a good opportunity to do some exploring of the city. the best part was riding on one of those double-decker open roof buses, especially since I would not have learned otherwise that in my own neighbourhood–at the cathedral of st john divine (that big church by the university)–there live two peacocks. and one of them is albino.

they just roam around freely on the church grounds! how random is that?