I’m not a parent. That ship has sailed for me, and there was a time when a twinge of envy would come over me whenever I encountered someone with children. A show like Adolescence takes that feeling of envy and replaces it with a deep appreciation for just how hard parenting can be.
The miniseries tells the story of a teenage boy who gets arrested and charged with stabbing and killing his classmate. It explores his motives, his school life, his relationship with the victim—a girl who he was involved with, in a confused teenage way—and especially, the effect of these events on his parents.
The current hype around this show mostly centres around the fact that each of the four 1-hour episodes is filmed in a single shot. I don’t have much to say about that aspect of it, other than kudos to the whole cast and crew for pulling it off. It’s truly impressive.
I don’t usually write about magazines, but they are a part of my regular reading diet. Recently, I picked up the January 2025 issue of National Geographic from a Little Free Library. My family used to have a subscription when I was a kid, and I must have flipped through dozens of issues. It’s nice to see that the magazine has endured, in much the same form as I remember.
Let me give a quick rundown what I found interesting in this issue:
The wreckage of the Endurance has been discovered under the Antarctic ice. The ship sank in 1915 during a legendary expedition, and the mission to find the wreck, even aided by modern technology like sonar and underwater drones, was just as difficult as the original voyage.
All tea leaves come from the same species of plant, Camellia sinensis. I always thought that the many varieties of tea—e.g. green tea, oolong, pu’er—were taken from different plants, but it turns out they are all the same leaf, just processed in different ways. Pu’er, the subject of this particular article, is fermented for up to 10 years. On Jingmai Mountain in China, a small indigenous community has been farming an ancient forest for centuries.
In New Zealand, there’s a conservation project underway to eradicate invasive predators (rats, possums, stoats, etc.), in order to protect the native bird species, like the iconic kiwi. At first glance, it seems brutal and violent to kill millions of animals, but the sad fact is that they should never have been there, since they were brought in by settlers coming from overseas1. The article describes some cool technological advances—e.g. self-loading traps, computer-aided visual identification of predators—that have helped the project along.
Footnotes
We’ve been playing a board game called Spirit Island, for which the theme is to defend an island against (human) invaders. It has put me in a mindset that has made it easier to understand the rationale for eradication, as unpleasant as it may sound. ↩
In Consent, author Jill Ciment reflects on her relationship with her late husband. They got together when she was 17 and he was 47, and stayed together until he passed away in his 90’s.
At the core of the book are the questions:
Does a story’s ending excuse its beginning?
[…]
Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?
I don’t think it’s a conflict that can be resolved: her and her husband’s long-lasting love was genuine, but he was her teacher and surrogate father figure when they met, which is indisputably icky. Through her writing, she does a good job of expressing her doubts, while also showing that she is ultimately at peace with the relationship.
My favourite parts of the book involve her revisiting her previous memoir, Half a Life, which she published in the midst of their marriage. In that book, she now sees a sort of self-censorship, where she glossed over the uncomfortable truths of how they first met, and made it seem like she had made all of the advances. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like this before, a double-layered memoir, showing in such a literal way how our recollections of the past change over time.
See also: the film May December, which covers some of same themes.
I much preferred this to the previous book, especially the second half, called “The Mule.” In the original Foundation novel, there’s a feeling of inevitability, which is kind of the point. The fledgling Foundation faces crises, i.e. threats from other planetary civilations, but it always turns out that Hari Seldon predicted what was going to happen. When the crises are resolved, always in the Foundation’s favour, it’s revealed that it was the only way that events could have unfolded.
Foundation and Empire turns the idea on its head by introducing a character called “The Mule,” who conquers planets at an alarming rate, and threatens to take over the Foundation. Without spoiling too much, I’ll just say that the Mule is unique, and since Seldon’s predictions only work on broad social events, the Mule throws the preordained plan into chaos.
In contrast to the “everything always works out” ethos of the previous novel, the Mule creates real tension and suspense. We experience the story through characters who don’t know what’s going to happen next… which is basically like most stories we read, but feels refreshing in this world of predestination.
This novel came to my attention during the Booker Prize shortlist period. On paper, it’s right up my alley—a literary novel with a space travel/sci-fi theme—and so, when it won the award, I became quite eager to get my hands on it.
The novel puts us on board the International Space Station, along with its crew of six astronauts, as they orbit the Earth. It covers a 24-hour period, during which they go around the world 16 times. There’s no plot really, other than a growing typhoon over Asia, and the fact that another crew is launching a mission to the moon on that same day.
The prose is well-written, with many poetic turns of phrase and lyrical passages. It does a good job of evoking the hardships that the astronauts go through: their sense of time is all out of whack because they experience 16 sunrises and sunsets every “day,” and they’re fighting to keep their bodies healthy in an envirnoment that humans are not built for.
After six months in space they will, in technical terms, have aged 0.007 seconds less than someone on earth. But in other respects they’ll have aged five or ten years more, and this is only in the ways they currently understand. They know that the vision can weaken and the bones deteriorate. Even with so much exercise still the muscles will atrophy. The blood will clot and the brain shift in its fluid. The spine lengthens, the T cells struggle to reproduce, kidney stones form. While they’re here food tastes of little. Their sinuses are murder.
But ultimately, I was disappointed with my reading experience. I found it frustrating because there was little narrative drive for me.
The Dragon Ball franchise will always have a place in my heart. When DBZ was airing on YTV during my high school days, I watched it religiously everyday. I’ll always regret not being able to finish the series because I moved to university and no longer had access to my own TV. More recently, I caught up with Dragon Ball Super during the pandemic lockdown. It didn’t leave much of an impression, to be honest, but I think I needed some comfort viewing during those anxious times.
And now, there’s a new series called Daima. Unlike the previous shows, which went on forever (some would say, dragged on forever), this one is a limited series with only 20 episodes. In the show, Goku and friends are transformed into children, and must adventure through the “demon realm” to restore their normal bodies and defeat the demon king.
I don’t really have much to say about it… it’s mostly mindless action. It seems that the animation quality is more consistent than I remember of the other shows, probably because it’s a limited run. I’m not a huge fan of having the characters be children, though… it feels like a way to increase the cuteness quotient of the whole thing, but doesn’t serve any story purpose.
Anyway, I’ll always get a kick out of it whenever one of our heroes powers up and shows off a new fighting technique or a transformation. A silly but fun nostalgia trip.
I had a good time with this horror thriller, especially for the first two-thirds. The performances from the trio of lead actors are all impressive, and the characters’ respective stances on religion are all well-represented. On the downside, the villain’s plot suffers from being overly convoluted—it’s a long walk just to make a philosophical point.
There’s a point that I want to think through, which will require spoilers, so stop reading if you don’t want to know.
I’m really hesitant to say it, but I didn’t really enjoy this one… of course it’s revered as a classic and I don’t doubt that it deserves it, but could it be that its stature is due to the strength of the series that it started, rather than its own merit?
A big part of the problem for me is the way that the story is told mainly through dialogue. Almost every scene involves a few people in a room, talking about grand abstract political or sociological ideas. There’s very little shown of how the various crises play out on the ground.
What does work are the ideas themselves: it is a fascinating bird’s-eye view of how a future civilization would develop over time. At first, the Foundation is set up to create a compendium of knowledge called the Encyclopedia Galactica, but it turns out this goal is simply the means to another end: namely, to give a reason for a small colony of scientifically-minded people to grow and thrive. Inevitably, they run up against the forces of surrounding planets, and they have to use unconventional (i.e. non-military) methods to continue as a society, including the creation of a religion based on the seeming magic of atomic power; and later, the use of economic trade to control their adversaries. In both cases, it’s their superior technology that allows them to win; the story’s conceit is that because the Foundation started as an academic endeavour, it allowed them to have the intellectual resources to develop said technology.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I wrote out that last paragraph that the chain of cause and effect actually clicked for me. During my time reading it, I found it hard to follow because it’s told at such a distance, with characters that are more mouthpieces than people. The two prequel novels that I’ve already read managed to balance the sociological concepts with adventure and character, so I think that Asimov’s skill as a storyteller improved as his career went on.
I have fond memories of going to see this when it came out in theatres in 1998. Watching it now, I think I can see why… back then, I would have thought it was the coolest thing, when they introduce characters with a freeze-frame showing their name on the screen. And the scene where our main characters walk as a group in slow motion and glare smolderingly at all of the other students who have been taken over by aliens… so cool.
The way this film depicts high school students was exactly my image of what it meant to be cool when I was that age: be angry and swear all the time, and talk to teachers with no respect! And fighting off an alien invasion was exactly the kind of thing that I fantasized about as a kid.
How does it hold up? I think it’s still entertaining. And I couldn’t believe who was in the cast… Jon Stewart? Salma Hayek, who appears in only a couple of scenes? Daniel von Bargen, a.k.a. Mr. Kruger of Kruger Industrial Smoothing on Seinfeld?
The characters in this Korean supernatural thriller include a professional shaman and a geomancer. The former performs rituals that exorcise bad spirits and the latter is a specialist in finding the most auspicious plots in which to bury the dead. I got a kick especially from the film’s depiction of the rituals, which involve elaborate dances and musical chanting. On the other hand, I was left asking at several points, if they’re such experts and professionals, why are they doing the thing that will obviously lead to having a curse descend on them? Just leave that mysterious gravesite alone!
When the bad spirits are released, it leads to some effective scary scenes, where the ghost only appears fuzzily in the mirror. I did have some trouble following exactly what was going on sometimes, but that may be because of some specific Korean mythology that I don’t know much about.
Ultimately, the movie has an interesting message about the identity of the Korean people, and the long historical relationship between Japan and Korea. I don’t think I felt it, but I’m sure it would hit native viewers much more.
