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Forbes
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
A New Memoir Illuminates The Backstory Of Past US-China Relations
Insufficiently noticed is a recent book with unprecedented glimpses into the history of how the US helped open post-Maoist China to the world - and it couldn't be more timely. These days, the PRC's increasing footprint on the world stage has caught the attention of geostrategic observers concerned with power balances not just in Asia but across the continents. That's aside from Beijing's increasing leverage in global trade and technology. This book should therefore be required background reading for anyone wanting to know how China climbed out of the Cold War decades and entered the current era. 'Eastward Westward' by Professor Jerome Cohen is actually a personal memoir, a highly readable one that offers revealing windows onto multiple other crucial pieces of history than just US-China relations. Let me say upfront that, for some decades, I have known the author, now in his 90s and the father of an old friend, Ethan Cohen, a top New York gallerist who introduced artists like Ai Weiwei to America. And as in most such situations, out of respect one doesn't ask the parents of a friend too many detailed questions about their achievements, so Prof Cohen's astonishing presence in history remained largely unknown to me - until reading the memoir. That may seem a strange admission from your Forbes columnist of over 25 years, a widely published journalist about foreign affairs and co-author of two books on the Russia-China alliance. But it conforms with the reason why Jerome Cohen was so efficacious and influential - he worked quietly and tactfully behind the scenes on resolving the nuggety details of great global initiatives while politicians and diplomats got all the publicity. Cohen first enters history when, having edited the prestigious Yale Law Journal as a student in the 1950s he becomes clerk to two Supreme Court Justices in succession, one a Chief Justice, an unheard of achievement. And suddenly the reader has a glimpse of Washington at a pivotal time when the US was still simmering from the previous year's Brown vs Board of Education court precedent. Within a few years Jerome Cohen has won a Rockefeller Grant to research the laws of Communist China, an almost impossible task considering the tightly sealed status of the country in the 1960s. Cohen overcomes the virtually insuperable challenge by asking the Hong Kong police to present him with any escapee from the PRC, even those found floating in the harbor. 'I figured if anybody knew about China's legal system it would be those fleeing from justice' says Cohen. As a thirty-something he becomes a leading global expert in Chinese law and in the mid 1960s is teaching at Harvard. Over the years he expands the Chinese law department to become the East Asian Law department. The outsize influence of that department on the political affairs of the Far East has yet to be acknowledged. In 1969, he chairs a meeting of Harvard and MIT professors which produces a confidential memo to President Nixon to start secret talks with China. 'That was the origin of Henry Kissinger's famous 1971 visit', says Prof Cohen. (Kissinger had been a colleague at Harvard - the two had often discussed such a demarcate). Here then was Cohen's first great stealthy entry on his path of quietly realigning East-West relations at a fundamental level. During the next decades, he travels broadly in the Far East with his family. His wife Joan is, in the meantime, a leading cultural intellectual on the region's visual arts. At the start of Deng Xiao Ping's era she is quietly meeting top Chinese artists in Beijing in their homes to view and encourage the stirrings of independent art in China. Hence the family's friendship with Ai Weiwei and his ilk. She is the first Western woman to lecture top art college students on the outside world's contemporary work. In the years before and after, Prof Cohen has expanded the East Asian Law department at Harvard to take in the most accomplished young minds of the region. They, in turn, go on to high government positions in their countries. One shouldn't forget that for a large chunk of that time, polities like South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and the like struggled with military and autocratic leaders. Cohen's students undoubtedly helped change the political climate. Then in the 1990s, Prof Cohen again quietly enters the engine room of history, this time to thrash out a dependable commercial code for foreign investment in the PRC. He is helped by fellow lawyers, ex students and Beijing officials to lay down this most crucial of foundations. By then he is a senior partner at the law firm of Paul Weiss and brings the first heavy foreign corporation investment into China. (He later returns to academe as a law professor at New York University). From the time of Nixon onwards he helps high profile political prisoners find freedom starting with his old Yale classmate Tom Downey who joins the CIA in the 1950s, is dropped into Maoist China, gets quickly arrested and serves 18 years in prison before Cohen engineers his release. Cohen intervenes on behalf of Benigno Aquino of the Philippines, Kim Dae Jong of South Korea, Annette Lu of Taiwan, all who help guide their countries to liberal governance. More recently he helps get Ai Weiwei released from prison and the famous 'Barefoot' blind lawyer Chen Guangchen. Though doubtless still respected as a leading pioneer of their present prosperity, Prof Cohen's human rights activities have, perhaps, not endeared him to the current Beijing leadership. What then does he make of the present situation after all his years of opening China to the world? He has trenchant words against the current norm there of 'rule by law' rather than 'rule of law'. And he's a strong supporter of Taiwan especially because its example contradicts all those who argue that Western-style governance is antithetical to Chinese traditions. The chapter dealing with such questions is wonderfully titled 'The Curfew Tolls The Knell of Parting Day' from Thomas Gray's famous poem. He is ultimately optimistic about the future of China, characteristically because he feels that its young legal minds offer a reservoir of potential for guiding the country's path. But you will have to read the book for a full exposure to the chapter's wisdom and Jerome Cohen's 94 years worth of it.
New York Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
So You're an Artist? How Many Followers Do You Have?
IT WAS A slow Saturday on the second-to-last afternoon of this past December's Art Miami, one of the city's longest-running art fairs, now eclipsed by the much flashier Art Basel Miami Beach. Ethan Cohen, a dealer with a gallery on West 17th Street in Manhattan, was sitting in his booth showing a sculpture by the Rhode Island-based artist Thomas Deininger called 'Macawll of the Wild' (2024). From head-on, the work appears as a realistic depiction of a blue-and-yellow macaw perched on a branch. But the piece changes as the viewer moves around it, revealing itself to be a perspectival trick — from the side, it's not a sculpture of a macaw at all but a seemingly random cluster of cheap found objects: unclothed dolls, a plastic palm tree, an action figure of Sulley from 'Monsters, Inc.' On closer inspection, the bird's tail is made of an unpeeled plastic banana, an orange bottle cap, a No. 2 pencil and a tangled tape measure, among other things. It was priced at $60,000, but Cohen had yet to sell it when a woman came by and shot a video of the piece. By the next morning, Cohen had numerous messages from people he hadn't heard from in a long time — a former assistant, an intern who'd worked for him a decade ago, a collector in Indonesia. The woman had posted the video on her TikTok account, @gabrielleeeruth, and 'somehow,' he told me, it 'tripped the algorithm.' Not only did the work quickly find a buyer but there were now hundreds of spectators at the booth, leaning over one another to shoot their own videos, so many that Cohen had to find somebody to handle crowd control to protect the art. It wasn't until his son, who's in his early 30s, suggested that Cohen check TikTok himself that he truly understood the magnitude of what was going on: The original video already had 16 million views by around noon on Sunday. By 3:30 p.m. it was up to 50 million. At 6 p.m., the fair was over and the video had 90 million views. The tally, as of this writing, is 118 million and counting. The sculpture by Deininger is part of a small but growing canon of art that, though not necessarily made for social media, is best understood through its reception there. At a time when A.I., pseudoscience and political misinformation have made us suspicious about what's actually real online, social-media art offers a kind of pared-down comfort. It's often literal, with little room for disagreement regarding its intentions. Yet in its conceptual ambitions or technique, it can seem just clever enough to make viewers say, 'Aha!' (rather than, 'My kindergartner could've made that'). Other examples include 2018's 'Love Is in the Bin' by Banksy, a painting that was timed to partially self-destruct following its sale at Sotheby's in London; Marco Evaristti's 2025 exhibition in Copenhagen, 'And Now You Care?,' in which the artist placed three baby pigs in a cage and left them to starve to death (someone set them free); and Noah Verrier's completely sincere paintings of junk food like a Taco Bell Crunchwrap. Marina Abramović's 'The Artist Is Present' is arguably the original viral moment for contemporary art, a 2010 performance in which Abramović sat in a chair at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for seven or eight hours a day and invited people to take a seat across from her for as long as they could manage. There was no Instagram or TikTok at that time, but it did inspire a Tumblr called Marina Abramović Made Me Cry — a collection of dozens of images of people doing just that as they stared into her face. On the surface, these works don't have much in common other than capturing the attention of the public. This is a genre of art that's often only as interesting as the response to it, which makes it especially interesting to the people doing the responding. In an interview, Deininger, 55, discussed how wild macaws are frequently poached in Miami, where they aren't protected. These deeper concerns were largely lost on the work's audience, many of whom, at least according to the thousands of comments on TikTok, came to the same confident conclusion: 'Now that's art.' A PIVOTAL MOMENT in the history of social-media art was the first show by Yayoi Kusama at David Zwirner gallery in 2013. Visitors waited for hours to see one of the Japanese artist's 'Infinity Mirror Rooms,' which Kusama, now 96, fills with mirrors and lights to give the illusion of boundless space. Instagram was still novel, with a just-introduced video function, and hordes of people lined up to claim some time in this seemingly optimal environment for selfies. 'The first time I ever posted on my social media was a Kusama show,' Hanna Schouwink, a senior partner at Zwirner, told me. By 2017, there were Kusama 'Infinity Rooms' at institutions around the world, with timed entries to accommodate the crowds. Kusama inaugurated a new era of art specifically catering to smartphone engagement. The conceptual artist James Turrell soon had a brief crossover moment on Instagram thanks to his 2013-14 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, when Drake (before his beef with Kendrick Lamar blew up) visited the exhibition and later used it as the inspiration for a music video. In 2019, when the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach, the work's sale for $120,000 made it onto CNN, an outlet generally uninterested in art fairs; when the piece was resold, with a different banana, at a Sotheby's auction last year for $6.24 million, it was international news. If there's an explanation for viral art, it's a tautological one, reminiscent of Don DeLillo's riff on 'the most photographed barn in America' from his 1985 novel, 'White Noise.' Why is it the most photographed barn in America? Because people keep taking pictures of it. Why do people keep taking pictures of it? Because it's the most photographed barn in America. 'They are taking pictures of taking pictures,' DeLillo writes. This poses a unique dilemma for artists in an industry that courts a mass audience while remaining generally suspicious of populism. The former New York Times art critic Roberta Smith believed that Kusama 'might be the greatest artist to come out of the 1960s' but was dismissive of the 'Infinity Rooms,' favoring her abstract paintings, which are virtually invisible on Instagram. There's always been a palpable disconnect between the high art celebrated by critics and the art to which the public pays attention. Consider Thomas Kinkade, the painter of twee cottages and gardens, who died in 2012, the same year Facebook purchased Instagram: He was, commercially, anyway, one of the most successful artists of the 20th century. In 1999, Robert Rosenblum, then a curator at the Guggenheim, said of Kinkade, 'He doesn't look like an artist who's worth considering, except in terms of supply and demand.' Social media has further corroded the boundary between popular and praised but, beyond that, it's also helped extend art world snobbery to the masses. Love is one way to go viral, as was the case with 'Macawll of the Wild,' but hatred is just as powerful. To quote one of the less unhinged replies to Cattelan's banana, 'This planet needs to get hit with a meteor and start over.' Social media may have given artists a direct outlet to speak to an audience without the backing of an institution, but it's telling how few artists have made work explicitly about it. (One exception is Amalia Ulman, whose 2014 series of Instagram selfies features a fictional character she created to critique the manners of the terminally online.) While Deininger said his prices have gone up since the fair in Miami, no serious artist wants to be pigeonholed as 'that person you saw on Instagram.' As Schouwink told me, 'I know a certain younger generation is very well versed in the medium of Instagram and happy to exist in that space. But I don't think that's a very long view. I wonder what will happen to all these brains that have this constant stimulus that doesn't lead anywhere.'
Fast Company
14-05-2025
- Health
- Fast Company
How Headspace and Ozlo help people drift off with sound
Ever wonder why the sound of rain makes you instantly drowsy, but a ticking clock drives you up the wall? That's because not all noise soothes the brain in the same way. Sleep sounds might seem like just background buzz, but they're carefully engineered to allow your brain to let go. Behind every babbling brook or rainforest storm track is an intricate design meant to quiet the mind, block out distractions, and nudge you toward sleep. As more people rely on sleep sounds to wind down, the industry behind them has surged, which is evidence of just how common this nightly ritual has become. Mediation and mindfulness app Headspace, says 51% of listeners use its sleep content (the app has been downloaded more than 70 million times). Ozlo, a company that created bluetooth earbuds that mask noise with sleep sounds, launched its flagship product in October 2024 after a successful Kickstarter. Since then, the company has sold nearly 100,000 units worldwide. Meanwhile, platforms like YouTube and Spotify are packed with 'deep sleep' playlists, sound baths, and endless loops of ambient noise. Color noise—white, brown, or pink, which emit sound energy at different frequencies—can be surprisingly effective at helping you fall and stay asleep. But we often oversimplify how they work, says Ethan Cohen, a music and sound composer at Ozlo Sleepbuds, and these sounds alone aren't a cure-all.
