Joshua Samuel Brown
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joshua Samuel Brown is an American writer who lives and works in Asia. His work has appeared all over the world in a strange and eclectic variety of publications. He has been hailed by noted Discordian thinker Lago Von Slack as
“the Mahatma Gandhi of restaurant criticism, the Rudyard Kipling of professional boxing, and the Lance Armstrong of economic planning.”
Josambro's first column, "Politics and Other Dirty Words," ran originally in the Colorado Daily before moving to the Rocky Mountain Bullhorn, where it ran semi-regularly until the left-leaning weekly closed down suddenly. He also wrote regular articles for the Bullhorn, and was employed there for several months during one of his infrequent and lengthy sojourns in the United States.
His most widely reprinted article to date is 2000's "Confessions of a Sweatshop Inspector" (also published as "Memoirs of a Dog Meat Man"), an expose of the "independent" sweatshop monitoring business stemming from a stint working with California Safety Compliance. In the article, Brown writes about the futility of sweatshop monitoring, summarizing the industry with the Chinese idiom "guà yángtóu mài gǒuròu" (simplified Chinese: 挂羊头卖狗肉), or "hang a sheep's head, sell dog meat".
In Asia, Josambro has been a long-standing contributor to Beijing and Shanghai based "City Weekend," and had been a semi-regular features contributor to Hong Kong's South China Morning Post. Since 2005 he has ceased contributing features to the latter paper, but a random features article of his appears (usually around once a month) in SCMP competitor The HK Standard. He has also contributed to Taiwan Journal, Business Traveller Asia, Asia!, Cat Fancy, and an eclectic variety of other publications.
He is a regular features contributor to online magazine Things Asian, the printing arm of which (Things Asian Press) published Vignettes of Taiwan(a book of short stories, essays, and random meditations about Taiwan) in 2006. He is currently co-authoring a travel guide on Taiwan for Lonely Planet.
A relatively complete archive of his work can be viewed at http://www.josambro.com/, and he keeps a blog called "Stinky Tofu" at http://josambro.blogspot.com/.
Brown is also an alumnus of Beijing Scene Magazine; though only with the now-defunct publication for a few months, he has been quoted as calling those months "formative" and "the longest and most instructive of my life."
