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Why Such Haste to Cook and Eat Me, China?

EnglishLife
··10 min read
Cao Zhi, a talented poet in the third century, is the younger brother of the king, Cao Pi. Jealous of his gift and suspicious of his threat to the throne, Cao Pi commands his kid brother to extemporize, after taking but seven paces, a poem on the subject of brethren, both as keeper and, implicitly, killer, without ever mentioning brothers in the poem, lest he be punished by death. This encapsulates the tension across the Taiwan Strait, where the well-wrought prosperity of the island may be peeing and shitting his pants while pleading for peace with the big brother. Read More

“Zero Day Attack” is in Final Evaluation a Mixed Bag

EnglishFilm
··2 min read
Zero Day Attack ultimately proves more along the lines of speculative fiction, rather than a prescient vision of what an invasion scenario for Taiwan might look like. If the series has some insightful, even moving episodes, others are far less successful. In this sense, the series is, in final evaluation, something of a mixed bag Read More

“This Is The End”: Up or Down; Wing It or Let Fall

EnglishLife
··7 min read
Near the end of the veteran journalist Scott Simon’s NPR program, Weekend Edition Saturday, on November 1, 2025, Simon asked Sir Anthony Hopkins to read the poem at the close of his memoir We Did OK, Kid (2025). The poem is T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), a poem of exhaustion and despair vaguely recalled by Hopkins’s frail, dementia-stricken father at Sandown Beach on, possibly, the Isle of Wight, now recited live, on the air, by the 88-year-old Hopkins. Bereft over the memoir’s “we”—his late father and the aging of the titular “kid”—Hopkins choked up again and again, begging out of the reading around the lines “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.” “I can’t do any more of that,” Hopkins apologized to Simon, “it kills me.” Read More

“Eyes of the Sky” Elaborates the Oceanic World of the Tao

BooksEnglish
··1 min read
Syaman Rapongan's "Eyes of the Sky" proves the latest work by the noted Indigenous author to be translated into English. Following up on the translation of his "Eyes of the Ocean," roughly a prose bildungsroman of Rapongan’s early life, Eyes of the Sky serves to further elaborate the “oceanic world” of the Tao Read More
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