Prince & Asian South

Featured Articles

The fugitive prince

Financial Times • 18 Jan 2025 • ~7150 words • Archive Link

A man with an obscure claim to a royal fortune made a deal to help regain his crown. It cost him more than he could imagine.

His given name is Paul. To his friends, he is Prince Paul. Today, he is in his seventies. A flash of grey runs through his slicked back black hair, but his bushy eyebrows and pouty lips retain some boyishness. He favours the uniform of European playboys, tailored sports jackets and luxury loafers. He speaks in the clipped, French-accented manner of someone who attended a continental finishing school. Depending on who you believe, his true name is Prince Paul Philippe al Romaniei, Crown Prince of Romania, grandson of King Carol II, direct descendant of Queen Victoria of England and Tsar Alexander II of Russia. To his enemies, he is simply Paul Lambrino, a fantasist who, even after everything that happened, claims heirship to a nonexistent throne.

Being an Asian Southerner Means Being an Anomaly, Squared

Electric Literature • 23 Jan 2025 • ~6100 words

This is how I know an Asian South exists: I miss it

As the critic Leslie Bow writes, Asians in the South have long occupied a kind of “social limbo, a segregation from segregation,” by which she means that Asians can rarely tell where they fit within the South’s racial pecking order. One could of course make the same argument about Asians elsewhere in this country. Outside of a few urban enclaves, aren’t most Asian communities so small as to barely register within any local patchwork of social relations? Perhaps the aberrancy of Asians in the South is simply a difference in degree, then—we feel more like a minority here than elsewhere, and so more existentially adrift.

Recommended Articles

Blood Ties

Boston Review • 20 Jan 2025 • ~5750 words

Jeanne Morefield explores the connections between America’s opioid crisis and its immigration policies, and how historical narratives, political decisions, and corporate interests have shaped this American crisis.

Every year, the United States issues a number of time-limited, non-immigrant visitor visas to Mexicans, allowing them to cross into El Paso and other border towns. Many do so in order to “donate” plasma at commercial plasma centers. Once in these centers, men and women—including many maquiladora workers—are connected to plasmapheresis machines where blood is drained from their arms, usually in exchange for a $50 prepaid Visa card. Their plasma is then commingled with the plasma of millions of U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants throughout the country—usually poor, often unhoused, and often, like the beautiful Boy, addicted to fentanyl—and transformed into $35 billion of market value for the American pharmaceutical industry.

Why the world isn't as bad as you think

The Garden of Forking Paths • 23 Jan 2025 • ~1950 words

News coverage is terrible at capturing the biggest good news stories: the long-term trends that show vast improvements in human living standards across long stretches of time. We need to fix that.

But unfortunately, the way that most people experience the news isn’t through slower, big picture journalism, but rather through breaking news in newspapers, or cable TV shows where anything beyond a five minute discussion is classified as a lengthy segment, or, worst of all, in flashy social media videos. And to cater to news consumers with short attention spans in the age of digital dopamine, it makes sense to cover and discuss a series of events in quick succession.

Writer, cartoonist Jules Feiffer dies at 95

The Comics Journal • 23 Jan 2025 • ~7150 words

After drawing and writing everything there was to draw and write, Jules Feiffer passed away at the age of 95.

Whatever form Feiffer was working in, comics — their sequential rhythms and juxtaposings — were at the base. In 1965, he paid a debt to the comic books he had grown up with by writing what may be the best book about comics ever published: The Great Comic Book Heroes. Half the book was given to reprints of classic Golden Age superhero origin stories, but the other half was a history of comics creators and superhero genre tropes filtered through his self-aware, witty, psychologically astute memories of those comic books. No other history of comics has been as entertainingly analytical and as steeped in the arcane joys of comics reading.

A Start-Up Claimed Its Device Could Cure Cancer. Then Patients Began Dying.

New York Times • 23 Jan 2025 • ~6100 words

Two U.S. companies teamed up to treat cancer patients using an unproven blood filter in Antigua, out of reach of American regulators.

In February, two months before the Hudlows’ ill-fated trip to Antigua, Jonathan Chow, ExThera’s director of medical affairs, warned the company’s top executives in a letter that the Antigua operation amounted to an unethical and unsafe experiment on patients and urged them to shut it down, according to three people familiar with the matter. During a brief visit to the island, Dr. Chow had witnessed patients bleeding from catheter wounds and screaming in pain. ExThera didn’t act on his pleas.

You’re Being Alienated From Your Own Attention

The Atlantic • 22 Jan 2025 • ~2850 words • Archive Link

Every single aspect of human life is being reoriented around the pursuit of attention.

In a world where attention has become a prized commodity, Chris Hayes reflects on how this shift shapes our lives and society. Drawing from his experiences in cable news, he explores the complexities of capturing and controlling attention, likening it to navigating a sailboat in changing winds. This thought-provoking essay invites readers to consider the implications of attention's commodification and the potential paths to reclaiming it in our daily lives.

Prosperity versus liberation

Aeon • 21 Jan 2025 • ~5100 words

How Pentecostalism’s prosperity gospel replaced Catholic liberation theology in Latin American life.

There were many reasons why people began converting, but doing it in reaction to the politics of a movement that struggled to move much beyond intellectual circles isn’t one of them. The refined hands that crafted liberation theology in darkened rooms were in stark contrast to the calloused palms that would ecstatically whoop and clap and promise the power of healing could be channelled through them. Too busy trying to defeat the insurgency from bookish Latin American priests, they failed to see the insurgency happening outside the cathedral walls.

Chimes at Midnight—Asterisk

Asterisk • 20 Nov 2024 • ~5100 words

It’s been an idea for over three decades. How did the clock that will run for 10,000 years become a reality?

Arriving at the primary chamber, you see the brass and quartz enclosure that protects the calculation system, the escapement, and a pendulum that completes one swing every seven seconds. The clock face itself is eight feet across. At the center is the black globe of a star field, encircled by movable rings that indicate sunrise, sunset, and the phases of the moon. The outermost ring gives the year, with room for five digits, and a readout for the current time is buried deeper inside. To update the display, which has been paused since the last visit, you rotate a small wheel by hand.