Paris 1924 Moscow 1934 New York 1944 San Francisco 1954 London 1964 Mogadishu 1974

▣ My thesis, introduced many times over the years, was that Shanghai 2010 was Paris 1924. The city attracted American expatriates in its Années folles. It attracted writers. It attracted also another, more contemporary class of Western dropout, who couldn’t go to Europe (culturally moribund), couldn’t go to Japan (a cool, gray shell of itself), couldn’t…