I'm not sure how good Thomas Boswell's geopolitical analysis is, but this is a nice column about what an Olympics in China is really like: "As sports spectacles go, I've never seen one more efficiently or soulessly executed than this one. I have no idea where they put the real people for 17 days..."
This article explains why I haven't been making Olympic TV time a priority -- the programming strategy is about making sports into some kind of "chick-flick" and pandering to all the women by offering ads for ways to improve ourselves with cosmetics while filling our children with junk food.
If a Chinese reporter has his camera and tape recorder taken away at the press conference about the stabbing of an Olympic visitor, does that mean the (alleged) murder did not happen?