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Chai used $160,000 of her own money and one year to make Under The Dome, the same title as a Stephen King novel.

Some scenes in the film are shocking, including a visit to a hospital operating room, where viewers see the damage China's polluted air can do to a patient's lungs.

Chai asks some tough questions about the politics and economics behind the smog, but often with a gentle, funny tone.

She talks to a local environmental official so powerless to enforce the country's laws that he admits, "I don't want to open my mouth because I'm afraid you'll see that I'm toothless."

Ten years ago, I asked what that smell in the air was, and I got no answer. Now I know. It's the smell of money.

- Chai Ling, journalist and documentary filmmaker

She confesses that, like many Chinese citizens, it was only recently that she learned the difference between fog and smog.

She interviews local officials who protect polluting industries because those industries create jobs and pay taxes.

Chai doesn't explicitly criticize China's model of economic development. Nor does she call for China's leaders to be held accountable for their policies.

She makes it clear, though, that pollution is a cost of rapid industrialization that China can no longer put off paying.

"Ten years ago, I asked what that smell in the air was, and I got no answer," she says. "Now I know. It's the smell of money."

In the film, Chai travels to Los Angeles and London to learn how those cities cleaned up their air. She concludes that China can follow their example, and that its citizens should get involved.

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"The strongest governments on earth cannot clean up pollution by themselves," she argues. "They must rely on each ordinary person, like you and me, on our choices, and on our will."

Ma Jun, the director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, agrees.

He calls Chai's documentary a wake-up call for China, comparable to An Inconvenient Truth, the 2006 documentary about climate change, and Silent Spring, Rachel Carson's 1962 book about harmful pesticides.

Ma offers an explanation for why China's government has not silenced Chai, and China's new environment minister even called to thank her.

"One reason such a hard-hitting film, that touched on deeply rooted problems, was allowed to be widely disseminated," he says, "is its positive direction, which gives people hope and confidence."

Chai has declined interview requests except for one from the website of the official People's Daily newspaper.

That website aired the documentary, until Wednesday, when it disappeared without explanation. It's still viewable elsewhere in China.

Of course, China has been saying for more than a decade that it's time to clean up the pollution, and that it's willing to accept slower economic growth in order to do it. But last year only 8 of 74 Chinese cities met the air quality targets – five more than in 2013.

Environmentalists have welcomed other encouraging signs in recent months. Last November, for the first time, China has set a target of 2030 for its carbon emissions to peak, before declining.

And it has promised to allow environmental groups to file class action lawsuits against polluters.

air pollution

pollution

China

A partial jawbone found in Ethiopia is the oldest human-related fossil, scientists say.

NPR's Christopher Joyce, who is reporting on the story, tells our Newscast unit that the discovery fills in an important gap in human evolution. He says:

"The fossil consists of a partial jawbone and several teeth. It dates back to about 2.8 million years ago.

"The team says the fossil appears to belong to an individual from the beginning of the ancestral line that led to humans. That would make it the earliest known Homo — the human genus.

"Writing in the journal Science, the researchers say the jaw and teeth are different from more ancient human ancestors, known as Australopithecus. Those ape-like creatures had broad teeth for grinding and deep jaws.

"The new fossil has smaller teeth and a more rounded jaw. It's 400,000 years older than the previous record for human-related fossils. The scientists say it comes from the earliest period of human evolution."

The fossil was discovered two years ago at a location in Ethiopia close to where Lucy — the skeleton of the sort of half-ape, half-human that lived a couple million years before humans evolved — was discovered.

fossils

Hoagland's poem, in many ways, is the manifestation of white supremacy and class anxiety, and my response to it remains complicated. "The Change" is both "racially complex" (Hoagland's words) and racist. I don't know if that's an achievement — but I find it indicative of an aspect of the culture wars we're witnessing today.

I think about this as I consider Rankine's precise accounting of white discomfort in proximity to black anger. In Citizen, Rankine explores the intersection of Serena Williams's ascension as a great athlete with public critiques of her body, her demeanor, her confidence, her periodic expressions of outrage and joy against the gaze of her white audience.

"What does a victorious or defeated black woman's body in a historically white space look like?" she asks. "Serena and her big sister Venus Williams brought to mind Zora Neale Hurston's 'I feel most colored when I am thrown against a white sharp background.'" Rankine's close study of how the world receives Williams — and by extension black bodies — reveal what was so troubling about Hoagland's 2002 poem: Its racism is casual because it lives in the language.

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There's the persistent seduction of collective amnesia, our desperate wanting to embrace a mythology that we've evolved. We want to erase the nightmarish truth that at one time, we were the kind of people who would inflict unspeakable cruelties to another human being.

We're afraid to confront the racism that is embedded in the very marrow of our systems and institutions. We look everywhere to negate that fact. But Rankine's clear and direct accounting of mundane yet fraught interactions between races — what some categorize as microaggressions — accumulate and magnify, revealing the stultifying biases that inform structural racism.

"For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person," she writes. "Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and as insane as it is, saying please." Rankine, who recognized the quiet violence in Hoagland's words and others, makes this struggle visible throughout the book.

Rankine's Citizen demands that we not look away.

Syreeta McFadden is a columnist for Feministing, and a contributing opinion writer for The Guardian US

Poetry

In 2003, then 21-year-old Jin, a Chinese-American rapper, released a single called "Learn Chinese" that was widely circulated but not well-received:

"Y'all gon' learn Chinese, when the pumps come out, you're gon' speak Chinese...

You must be crazy, we don't speak English, we speak Chinese
And the only popo we know,
Is the pigs on the hook out by the window
Each time they harass me I wanna explode
We should ride the train for free, we built the railroads
I ain't your 50 cent, I ain't your Eminem, I ain't your Jigga Man, I'm a CHINA man"

Jin was riding high when "Learn Chinese" came out: he came up in the rap scene as a battle rapper, scoring seven wins in BET's 106 & Park freestyle competitions, and was the first Asian-American to release a solo album with the label Ruff Ryders.

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But the song and its music video drew mixed reactions, to say the least. "Learn Chinese" sampled cliched Orientalist tropes, calling on the snake-charmer tune and Yellowman's 1981 song "Mr. Chin." It also incorporated the nasally sounds of a Chinese zither. Critics charged Jin with peddling in Chinese-American stereotypes, invoking reductive imagery without pushing back on it.

As music critic Dorian Lynskey wrote for The Guardian in 2005, Jin was struggling to balance visibility with integrity: "However much Jin wants to avoid racial pigeonholing, these are his most original and exciting tracks."

Loren Kajikawa, an ethnomusicologist at the University of Oregon, says the producers of "Learn Chinese" were probably trying to play on Jin's "sonic otherness," making his apparent foreignness seem interesting while trying — but failing — to defy the same stereotypes he was calling on.

"As a whole, it starts off promising, because he's trying to push back on these stereotypes and subvert them," Kajikawa tells me, "But what he ends up giving you in place is this kind of Chinatown make-over of a gangster-rap video, which doesn't really challenge the kind of conventions or norms in hip hop, which is fine if you're not trying to do that, but I think he was."

Despite the notoriety of "Learn Chinese," or perhaps because of it, Jin faded from the spotlight soon after that album. Now, at 32, he's trying to stage a comeback. His new album is called XIC:LIX — 14:59 — which some have taken as a nod to what could be the end of his 15 minutes of fame. He reflected in an Arena interview last fall about what it was like being one of the lone Asian-Americans in his industry at a very young age — and what he sees as missed opportunities:

"With 'Learn Chinese' while I was in the studio with 'Clef and the whole Ruff Ryders environment, I think the intentions were there. The intentions were pure, but the execution may have been where there was a miscalculation, even if you talk about visually, the video, running around and doing karate kicks and sliding on the floor and all that extra stuff.

At the time, like I said in the verse, I'm in my early 20s, I'm just having a ball. I'm enjoying it. Whereas now I look back on it, I'm like, 'Wow, that was such a great opportunity to make a statement and this is the statement that you made Jin?' "

In a song on the new album called "Chinese New Year," Jin mixes Cantonese and English and raps about and what happened after the release of "Learn Chinese":

"While we on the topic, I got something to reveal,
Can I be real though,
I mean really real,
'Cause at one point,
I was losing sleep
Thinking about the first song that I ever released,
Looking back, it was a lesson in my eyes,
And if you never heard of it,
Hey that's just a blessin' in disguise.
Learned Chinese dropped,
Things never been the same,
Credibility gone, yo, charging into the game.

... I was barely 21, but that's not an excuse
I got on my own two feet and walked in that booth.
To make y'all proud, that's what I'm trying to do here,
Because for me, every day is Chinese New Year."

"It's like Jin made a 180," says Oliver Wang, a professor at California State University, in a recent profile by Jean Ho at Buzzfeed. "On 'Chinese New Year,' it's all about looking inward via introspection and he basically apologizes for his 21-year-old self on 'Learn Chinese,' which is striking since it's rare to see many rappers walking back their own earlier catalog."

As Jin tries to retake the stage — another potential brush with success, another segment of his career to reflect on — it seems clear that it was never fair to ask a 21-year-old, the only big-name Asian-American in the game at the time, to make everybody happy.