Andrew Leonard

Jan 30, 2025 | andrewleonard.substack.com | Andrew Leonard

(Read Part I)The Chinese language must go the way of all cumbrous and out-of-date institutions. The language has no alphabet; there is instead a defective and irregular system of radicals and phonetics that forms some sort of basis… A Chinese typewriter is out of the question. A Chinese book is written in vertical columns, which follow each other from right to left.

Jan 16, 2025 | andrewleonard.substack.com | Andrew Leonard

The current that drew me from Gottfried Leibniz to curiosity about the remarkable history of the Hohenzollern dynasty and the rise (and fall) of Prussia, led, thanks to a recommendation from my sister Amy Leonard, who is a Reformation historian at Georgetown University, to Hans Rosenberg’s Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience 1660-1815, first published in 1958.

Jan 15, 2025 | andrewleonard.substack.com | Andrew Leonard

(Read Part I)At a press conference on January 9, Li Wenqing, the vice governor of Sichuan, said that “two-thirds of the world's iPads, nearly 80 million laptops, and over 100 million smartphones were manufactured in the Sichuan-Chongqing region in 2024.”Two-thirds of the world’s iPads. I heard a ghostly echo in the boast.

Jan 3, 2025 | andrewleonard.substack.com | Andrew Leonard

In my ongoing research into the roots of Chinese wuxia story-telling, I’ve been reading James J. Y. Liu’s The Chinese Knight-Errant, a history of representations, both nonfictional and fictional, of China’s longstanding tradition of Robin Hood-esque chivalric adventurers, first published in 1967.

Dec 20, 2024 | andrewleonard.substack.com | Andrew Leonard

A couple of weeks ago I checked Spotify to see if anything interesting had dropped in the Chinese Studies section of the New Books Network podcast series and an electric jolt went through my body: the newest book was Tofu: A Culinary History, by Russell Thomas. I mashed the play button so hard I bruised my finger.