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kottke.org posts about Chris Stokel-Walker

Deracialization surgery

Chris Stokel-Walker introduces us to Leo Jiang, who used to be Hao Jiang and is one of the thousands of people each year who get plastic surgery in order to look less Asian and more Western. Or not.

“Race does not enter the consciousness [in Asia] in the same way it does here,” explains Sharon Lee, an assistant professor at New York University who has written extensively about plastic surgery in Asia. “It’s easy to pathologize a whole country of people.” The West’s preoccupation with race colors its opinion, projecting discomfort onto surgery that for many may not have any overt racial elements. “This notion that Korean women want to become white becomes a really easy answer,” Lee says. “That’s not to say that race isn’t important, but when we stop there we’re overlooking much larger structural and historical phenomenons. No Korean woman says, ‘I want to look white.’”


The inside story of Pong

On the 40th anniversary of the seminal game’s invention, Chris Stokel-Walker looks back at the history of Pong and why it was such a big deal for the gaming industry.

On Nov. 29, 1972, a crude table-tennis arcade game in a garish orange cabinet was delivered to bars and pizza parlors around California, and a multi-billion-dollar industry was born. Here’s how that happened, direct from the freaks and geeks who invented a culture and paved the way for today’s tech moguls.