Joshua Samuel Brown

Joshua Samuel Brown is an American writer who lives and works in Asia. His work has appeared all over the world in a 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.”

Brown'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 weekly closed down suddenly. He also wrote regular articles for the Bullhorn, and was employed there for several months during one of his 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, Brown 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 "aiwan Journal", "Business Traveller Asia", "Asia!", "Cat Fancy", and a variety of other publications.

He is a regular features contributor to online magazine "Things Asian". He is currently co-authoring a travel guide on Taiwan for "Lonely Planet".

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."

External links

* [http://www.josambro.com/ Archive of works]
* [http://josambro.blogspot.com/ Joshua Samuel Brown's blog]