It's been raining heavily in Hong Kong so I had to forgo a hike today in favor of a quiet morning in my apartment. I went to a lecture at Hong Kong University this afternoon and then had dinner with a senpai from high school who just moved to Hong Kong.
I'm reading Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Dr. Atul Gawande. Gawande's book frames stories about medicine around three intangible reasons he sees as helping doctors save lives--diligence, doing right, and ingenuity. The first two chapters (what I've read so far) talk about innovations in the infection-control unit in a hospital and mobile operating rooms in Iraq. I've been spending lots of time with the characters of Grey's Anatomy recently, so this is a nice alternative for that emergency room drama that doesn't involve hours in front of my computer.
There was a fabulous, fabulous article in the New York Times Magzine last year about a hospital that used a creative screen saver to convince doctors and nurses to wash their hands, linked here. The New York Review of Books has a review of Better, along with articles on Tom Stoppard's new play and the West German Stasi in this month's issue.
More sites from the past two weeks:
International Crisis Group speech on conflict and mass violence in Africa.
Han Yan actually has more than one blog. One of my favorites is here. She writes the connection between an incident at Dragon I (the model club in Hogn Kong) and a Taiwanese writer defending culture to a City Council. (Art, as an Italian diplomant once told me, is sometimes the only solace.) Her other blogs include a blog to defend RTHK, and mediated accounts of visits to China and other topics.
Wei Leng is showing her photos of people in their homes at Grotto gallery here in Hong Kong. She'll be traveling to Japan this weekend to the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, her work is being shown as part of the Young Portfolio Aquisitions 2006 exhibit.
James Whitlow Delano has a web exhibit called "Taming the Yellow Dragon" at Digitaljournalist.org. The photos document "the battle to halt the Gobi desert." His website. Magnum photo's podcasts and photo essays.
