There’s something of a throw away line in this interview with Chinese poet-dissident Ran Yunfei:

There is this teahouse culture here—you have these places where you can meet publicly. Not a lot of Chinese cities have these. Everywhere there are tea houses and people meet and talk.

Ran is explaining why the Sichuan province is known for its disproportionate number of dissidents.

But it does get one thinking, doesn’t it?

Like most people, I tend to idealize portions of the time of my youth. In this case, it is the coffeehouse culture that grew up in the early nineties. I’m also love reading about the early coffeehouse culture in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as cafe culture in France.

Right now, America does not have a cultural venue for discussion of the type Ran describes in Sichuan.

Starbucks is a place to get coffee and go. Even places where one hangs out are primarily venues for wireless internet.

We don’t have a place where the primary beverage is non-alcoholic (we want discussions and debates, not sloppy brawls), even if some alcohol is served, where discussion and debate, including with relative strangers, is fomented.  And that has to be hurting our national political and intellectual culture/capital.

I will give a shout out to the Globe in downtown St. Petersburg which makes a special effort to engender that sort of environment