In today’s Times: a very seri­ous arti­cle on China’s very seri­ous pol­lu­tion prob­lem. The sta­tis­tics are damn­ing: only 1% of China’s res­i­dents breathe air con­sid­ered safe by Euro­pean stan­dards. China burns more coal than the USA, Europe, and Japan com­bined. Build­ings are fre­quently unin­su­lated (in vio­la­tion of China’s own codes). Equip­ment for power plants and fac­to­ries are delib­er­ately built with older, inef­fi­cient tech­nolo­gies for cost and speed. Water is start­ing to run dry.

I wouldn’t think much about the arti­cle had I not seen it all myself in April. China is, in a word, grim. The rapid growth is excit­ing, but when you can’t see the top of a build­ing just one block away because the pol­luted air is so thick, some­thing is ter­ri­bly wrong. When I returned to the United States, I suf­fered from a per­sis­tent hack­ing cough for over a month. It was so bad that my doc­tor ordered chest X-rays. Find­ing no signs of pneu­mo­nia, he con­cluded that I was just get­ting the pol­lu­tion out of my sys­tem. He put me on a Cor­ti­sone inhaler for a few weeks.

For­tu­nately for me, my Chi­nese busi­ness con­tacts urged me not to exer­cise while I was there. (I had planned to go run­ning every other day, as I usu­ally do when I travel.) Good luck to the Olympic athletes.

Also in today’s Times: an amus­ing review of “How Lux­ury Lost its Lus­ter”. There is noth­ing shock­ing here, but it is funny to read the story of how the reporter real­izes she has been swin­dled: the “lux­ury” goods she spends a month’s salary on are just ordi­nary mass-produced items with an expen­sive logo. Today’s goods have lit­tle in com­mon with the truly high-end prod­ucts that cre­ated the rep­u­ta­tions of these fabled lux­ury brands years ago.

Peo­ple who have read Naomi Klein’s fan­tas­tic book No Logo: Tak­ing Aim at the Brand Bul­lies will already appre­ci­ate the irony.

The Boston Pub­lic Library sucks. If the crum­bling ceil­ing, stained car­pet, flick­er­ing lights, decrepit fur­ni­ture, and odd odor aren’t suf­fi­ciently off-putting, their col­lec­tion might be. I went yes­ter­day look­ing for a two-volume set by Lewis Mum­ford. The online cat­a­log (I inad­ver­tently call it a “card cat­a­log” when speak­ing) showed two copies of the set were in Boston. But the shelf was a dif­fer­ent story: they had 5 copies of vol­ume 2, and none of vol­ume 1. Nat­u­rally, vol­ume 1 is the book I was look­ing for. The librar­ian was con­fused, too. He tapped away at his com­puter and uncon­vered even more incon­sis­ten­cies between the BPL’s inter­nal inven­tory and the “pub­lic catalog.”