Joshua E. Livingston’s Sunrays on the Beachhead of the New Creation, a book with 54 short stories with black and white graphic illustrations that serve the tales beautifully and integrally, deals with what it means to have faith (specifically Christian faith), and what it takes to have faith when our daily reality is decidedly secular. When secularism is practically a religion, what does it mean to believe, be spiritual, and attempt to see beyond ourselves? Does life have no meaning beyond what we are capable of understanding? Read More
What follows, written at a time when news is coming out of both Hong Kong and Thailand of young activists facing prison time for speaking out for things they believe, is the English language original of the preface of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink Read More
Andrew Beckershoff's Social Forces in the Re-Making of Cross-Strait Relations is a useful look at the backdrop of events that later led to the 2014 Sunflower Movement. Read More
Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang by Nicholas de Villiers is a strong entry in the English-language literature on one of Taiwan’s most distinguished contemporary filmmakers Read More
Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives, edited by Robert Ovetz, is an ambitious book Read More
Hsin-Hui Lin's Contactless Intimacy is a claustrophobic character study, a dazzling exercise in worldbuilding, and a chilling thought experiment: what would happen if artificial intelligence gained the power to dictate human intimacy? In a world where physical contact is prohibited, relationships are optimized by machines, and free will is exposed as fiction, what might become of individual agency? Read More
Jonathan Lerner's Lily Narcissus is an elegiac novel, reflecting on a period of history long gone Read More
New Bloom/No Man is an Island editor Brian Hioe spoke to writer Charles Yu about his recent book, Interior Chinatown, which recently won the National Book Award Read More
Deliberative Democracy in Taiwan: A Deliberate Systems Perspective by Mei-Fang Fan is a useful look at contemporary democracy in the Taiwanese context. Read More
Dafydd Fell’s recent academic monograph, Taiwan’s Green Parties: Alternative Politics in Taiwan, is not to be missed for those who are interested in or who study party politics in Taiwan. Drawing on close to a decade of research and observation, the book details the ebbs and flows, as well as the transformations, experienced by the Green Party in Taiwan since its founding. The book also focuses on the Social Democratic Party and Trees Party as Green Parties Read More
林新惠的《零觸碰親密》是一部深入角色直至引發幽閉恐懼的作品。小說建構的世界令人讚歎不已,同時也是令人不寒而慄的思想實驗:如果有一天人工智能得以支配人類彼此的親密關係,會發生什麼?在一個身體接觸被明令禁止、人際關係被機械優化、自由意志近乎虛無的世界,個人的能動性將會發生什麼變化? Read More
In 2016, Trump shocked liberal Democrats. They should not have been shocked. It takes a certain level of ignorance and magic thinking to believe in their candidate at the time. Hilary Clinton, after all, is the spouse of a president whose trade policies were largely responsible for the closing of factories and deindustrialization of the nation Read More