For fake news to exist, there must be a “real news.” A lot of news, or what counts as news in Taiwan, for instance, is a weak kind of fake news, because Taiwanese news stories are frequently too trivial even to be considered news (e.g., a new restaurant forgot to include free napkins). In these trivial cases, truth or falsity does not even matter. But the “fake” in fake news has a metaphysical component. What type of metaphysics is a criterion for distinguishing fake from real news? For most people, only another story or collection of stories can prove that a particular story is factually wrong (unless one actually witnessed the news-making event). There is no way for a regular reader to go above and beyond any particular news story to adjudicate its truth value from God’s point of view, so she can only arbitrate between competing stories filtered through her own prejudices and biases. Furthermore, something is usually off about any news story—a detail, a nuance, the choice of words, implicit and explicit prejudices.

The Idea of an Archive An archive is a non-random collection of things, or the place where such a collection resides. The concept of non-randomness or purposiveness implies that archivists have a reason for archiving—that an archive is a meaningful project with a set of goals. It is possible to generate an archive by accident, so long as some party in the future can attribute meaning to this accidental collection of things. 1 An accumulation of dangerous nuclear waste is not normally…

This dialogue begins in anger, but ends abruptly in surrender. It is about mundane and trivial issues when compared to the grand scheme of things. It is about the typical slights that happen every day within a local socio-geographical structure. It is about some of the things we only talk about at friendly dinner parties or when drunk in bars. It is based on the solid evidence of rumors, mixed metaphors, gossip, knowing looks, insults, movies, astrology, intoxicants, and guilty confessions….

Preamble Much has been written about nationalism, probably too much, and each day seems to bring more headlines and tragic stories about nationalist causes and ultranationalist atrocities. Everyone else’s nationalism is a problem, while one’s own intimate nationalist tendencies go unchecked. The following is my self-understanding of the theoretical origins of ultranationalism—a topic that I have contemplated and researched for many years now. I have attempted to draft a speculative…

Continued from “ From Guilt to Sickness, Part I: Looking for Plague in All the Right Places” November 18, 2012: Unity is Strength Today we will commemorate the seventieth anniversary of a biological weapons attack on Chongshan, a village near the city of Yiwu. I am not as rested as I would like to be, since I know this will be a long day of carrying heavy equipment. The night before, my roommate, Professor J., excitedly showed me video clips of what he called the real “qi…

In late 2012, I was invited to a ceremony memorializing WWII Japanese biological weapons attacks on a village near Yiwu in Zhejiang Province. The ceremony would be attended by a group of Japanese researchers whom I would follow throughout the province on their investigation of Japanese germ warfare. This is my production diary: November 13, 2012: The Laws of Wartime I’m flying directly from Taiwan to Shanghai. To me, this is still amazingly convenient, as I remember when there were…