A new voice

Salon has an interesting new feature that started this week, the blog How the World Works. In the lengthy but interesting introduction, Andrew Leonard writes about teaching Chinese in Taiwan in the 1980s, eventually realizing that he was helping to create the competitive edge for people who might one day compete with him for work, "seeding the future with my own nemesis."

The new blog then is "a stab in the dark at exploring the territory of globalization, at finding believable answers to complicated questions," he writes. His first two posts after that introduction deal with the increasing price of polysilicon and what that means for microchip production in China, and about what the recent announcement by Ford of layoffs and plant closings means in the larger context of global competition.

As a staff writer at Salon, Leonard has written some interesting pieces on the topic of globalization. Salon's blurb about the new blog says the beat of globalization is "too big for any one story or book." Perhaps keeping up with this fast-moving topic with the equally fast moving form of a blog will allow Leonard to stay on top of things. Stay tuned.