Author: Adam Minter

Bed 31 is covered with a thin white blanket, awaiting the post-surgery arrival of Deng Yilian, 52, native of tiny Malu in southwest China’s Hunan Province. To the left, on Bed 30, Deng’s daughter Cotton, 29, now of Shanghai, is seated, legs crossed; to the right, on a bed inexplicably labeled 31+, her son Mondy,…

I first encountered an Uta Barth photograph six years ago, wandering through a group exhibition of eleven artists at the prestigious Getty Center in Los Angeles. The works were high-concept, low-execution, clearly the product of expensive art school educations, and, like pretentious dinner guests, unjustifiably boring. Then, turning a corner, I stopped dead in front…

At 9:28 a.m. thirty-one grain traders are milling around a trading pit—an octagon about the size of a pontoon boat, recessed into the hardwood floor—at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. Steps are wide and lazy, chests are thrust outward. Several of the men (and they are all men) discuss the price of downtown real estate; a…

The southbound highway out of Baraboo, Wisconsin, passes Delaney’s Surplus and then, in rapid succession, a fifteen-foot radiator penetrated by a giant key, a twenty-foot iron heart with a ray gun protruding from it, and a giant scrap metal chicken with plumage partially constructed from brass doorknobs. A dirt road hairpins from out of this…

Why rent when you can own? At my neighborhood shop in Shanghai, well-ordered racks are full of the latest Hollywood releases, the Hollywood catalog dating back to the mid-1960s, and a middling selection of Chinese films and television series, most of which sell for between eighty-five cents and two bucks. The majority have English and…

A Saturday night in late summer and downtown Rochester was completely dark except for an exceedingly lively block of First Avenue Northwest. At one end, a tall Somali man leaned into the window of a black Chevy Cavalier and spoke with a woman wearing a red silk hijab, or headscarf. Behind the Cavalier, three Somali…