Abstract: Food and drink have played a central role in Chinese religious and ceremonial life from ancient times to the present. The role of food and drink is conspicuous not only in terms of banquet and drinking etiquette, but also in a wide variety of religious practices observed throughout the Chinese-speaking world. These range from ancestral
Abstract: Nearly ubiquitous in China today, beef was not always so popular. Unlike pork, beef was traditionally a highly regional taste. While people in northern cities like Beijing consumed large amounts of beef, those in many other areas considered the idea of eating beef to be disgusting and even immoral. As beef consumption grew during the
Abstract: From antiquity, Chinese poets wrote about all aspects of food: its cultivation, its preparation, its prominence in celebrations, its importance in ancestral rites, its pleasures, and the pain of its absence. Poets contrasted lavish banquets with hunger and starvation; they crafted allegories and metaphors from food: an orange was compared to a virtuous man, bitter
Abstract: While many new technologies carry the promise of creating a better world, they often have unintended consequences. The promise of blockchains is trust-minimizing and immutable peer-to-peer interactions, but early blockchain platforms have faced a great deal of skepticism regarding their environmental sustainability, and continue to cast their shadow over the technology’s potential today. Citation:
Abstract: The term “impact investing” describes the work of companies, organizations, and funds seeking to achieve measurable social and environmental gains while also generating financial returns. This sector has struggled with how to measure—quantitatively and qualitatively—the impact of investments. The past decade has witnessed the emergence of formal institutions that have achieved some success in addressing
About this podcast In 2009, I wrote in Library Journal that the role of an encyclopedia creator together is to build circles of knowledge. I said that our job is to create a haven of calm within a wild world of information, and misinformation. A haven where readers
Kerry Brown, a leading China scholar based in London, discusses the challenges of 2020 and the growing need to understand China and its history. Berkshire first published This Is China: The First 5,000 Years in 2010. Professor Brown has now updated the book in a second edition with a new chapter on recent developments.
A major barrier to effective international action is skepticism about climate change in the United States, the richest and most powerful country in the world, and the country with the largest scientific establishment and the largest number of Nobel Prize winners. This skepticism baffles many. It is true that powerful interests have conducted a well-funded and
David Christian, Macquarie University; WCU Professor, Ewha Womans University, Seoul This article is adapted from the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History. The English word science derives from the Latin scire, “to know.” In many languages, the word science or its equivalents can be used broadly to mean “a systematic body of knowledge that guides our relations with
April fool! In spite of all the promise of artificial intelligence and the huge amount of data being collected and crunched, the ideas in our April Fool's Day email are just a joke. You're still going to devote all too much time to Facebook. We spun a similar April Fool’s story in in 2005 with the
