The weekend is here, hallelujah! For many, this weekend will be heavily focussed on Thanksgiving! Whether that’s taking advantage of all of the offers in the bars and restaurants, staying at home ‘Skype’-ing your loved ones, or chowing down on a Turkey sub from Subway, we’re sure there’s going to be some Thanksgiving influence in there. If you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, or if you do but you want something else, then here are our picks of the best goings on in Shanghai this weekend! more ›

Well this week has certainly flown by, hasn’t it? As the working week is winding down, it’s time to step things up a notch in preparation for the weekend. We’ve all ready given you the low down on all the best live music in our Midweek Music Preview, AND all the best Art in our ‘Art Round Up’. So, without further ado, here’s what else there is to get excited about… more ›

Get a closer look at the 19th century French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine and get tangled into the symbolist movement, absinthe hazes and gay love scenes. Later this afternoon Vienna Café shows the 1995 movie Total Eclipse which depicts the friendship between the two poets. more ›

It's tough being a student in China. In addition to all the regular adolescent troubles, like being bullied by your classmates and potentially your teacher, you've also got to worry about getting into college. And the college entrance exam is no easy task: the gaokao can make or break your entire future, depending on how far down the line of causality you want to follow it. Students will do anything to get good marks: cheating is rampant, and intensive study camps are a more ›

Earnshaw Books will host an evening of performance to celebrate this month's release of two new titles - The Peace Correspondent by Garry Marchant and China Rhymes by Shamus A'Rabbitt, featuring a new foreword by Andrew Chubb. more ›

China takes a lot of crap for failing to get a second opinion on the English they throw into circulation, often leading to amusing f*ck ups like this and this. It turns out, however, that this knife cuts both ways. more ›

At the risk of pissing off our rich and powerful film producer friends and thereby never getting invited to a press junket again, we want to begin this movie review with a simple declarative sentence, the likes of which has not and may never be seen again in film criticism: the movie Blood Brothers (天堂口) sucked ass. more ›

The principal of the 150-student Henan Child Prodigy School (河南神童学校), Zhang Xuexin (张学新) says he has devised a revolutionary method of training the right brain of children to make them child prodigies. His students can not only memorise their textbooks and ancient poetry, they can actually recite them backwards. Throughout the school and around classrooms, one sees banners such as “China's first school that teaches education of the total brain" (中国第一所全脑教育学校), “Today's child prodigy, tomorrow's talent" (今日东方神童，明日世纪天才) and "I am a child prodigy, I am a memory expert" (我是神童，我是记忆天才). more ›

Back in April we did a post on the top ten books favored by the users of Douban.com, a book review and recommendation site. Since that time, tastes have changed and new books have been released so it's about time to take a new look at the site's top ten: more ›

We have a friend who we swear is paid by the New York Times, because all he ever does is send us links to stories from that rag. The latest is entitled "Singing and Doing the Hustle in Austin" and covers the South by Southwest Music Festival, which is an indie music fan's wet dream (it ended on Sunday). The story mentions that more than 20 percent of the musical acts in the festival came from outside the US. Then it said this: more ›

Thanks to the kind folks at ARCH, the second installment of movie nights at ARCH is going to be this Thursday, and the movie we will be showing is Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai's (王家卫) Happy Together, starring Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung as gay lovers in Buenos Aires. If you've never witnessed what happens when you cross Christopher Doyle's cinematography with Wong's cinematic sensibilities, we could point you to numerous writings on it. Fans of Wong probably know that there have been critical scholarly books written about this movie as well as full-length auteurist studies of his corpus to date. more ›

At least that's what celeb writer Yu Qiuyu (余秋雨) said at a recent public function. From Slate Indiaenews.com we found this report: more ›

So everyone is reporting what we warned you about. Here's what the AP said: more ›

For the ever-pragmatic Chinese, adopting English names has always represented a way for them to bridge the linguistic and cultural gap. Now, as China widens its reach abroad and as the number of expatriates living in China swells, picking an English name has become a rite of passage for most young, urban Chinese. So ... this is news?

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GigShanghai: Robots, poems and bagpipes more ›

Shanghai Daily says that we ought to expect to see some famous British poems adorning our city's subways in the near future. From the report: more ›

Mediterranean Sandwich and Coffee Bar on Da Gu Lu more ›

We're no prudes here at Shanghaiist. We've seen the dancing poles at Blue Angel. We've been propositioned by local ladies passing in the street (as recently as last week, in the dairy section of the Fresh Mart at Jing'an City Plaza). Admittedly, though, we're yet to experience a stage full of male strippers. more ›