Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).

Miss China, Zhang Zilin, is the new Miss World 2007: Fili's World has some info on the new pageant winner along with an extensive photo gallery.

Reading habits on the mainland: "Chinese bookstores are stacked with signs of change, suggesting a readership often on the same page as Westerners, yet also reflecting a distinct and evolving national character," writes Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom in United Hemispheres magazine.

From Kundera to Dostoyevsky: In the China Daily, Raymond Zhou talks about what it means to be "meaningful" in a cross-cultural context:

Even if you haven't seen any of [Ang] Lee's movies - or if you don't like them - you'll find his words full of revelations. He is simply a marvel of cross-cultural jaywalking. He observes rules when he sees fit, but more often he creates new rules by opening up worlds we didn't even know existed.

A culture is like a universe all its own - a person can live in only one culture at any given time. But with the rapid pace of globalization, we need people who can hop between two universes and find parallels so that people from both sides can penetrate the glass partition of differences and communicate in meaningful ways.

Bird flu death in Jiangsu: From the AP:

A man in southern China's Jiangsu province has died of bird flu, becoming the country's 17th official fatality from the disease, the government said Monday.

The 24-year-old man, whose surname was given as Lu, died Sunday at a hospital and tests confirmed he was suffering from the difficult-to-treat H5N1 virus, the Jiangsu Provincial Disease Control and Prevention Center said in a statement on its Web site.

The report said the man had no known contact with dead poultry, and there were no reported outbreaks of bird flu in the province. He developed chills, fever and other symptoms on Nov. 24 and was hospitalized three days later, it said.