A website exploring the novel's themes of climate change and artificial intelligence
Henry Lien’s book Spring Summer Asteroid Bird provides an introduction to a common form of Asian storytelling known in the West by its Japanese name kishotenketsu. To understand and appreciate kishotenketsu we need to quickly recap the traditional three-act story structure. In this familiar structure the first act sets up the story […] Read More
In the ongoing buzz following the launch of ChatGPT, people are once again predicting a near-future singularity, when artificial intelligence will match and then exceed human intelligence. Author Erik J. Larson makes a strong case that this is a myth. In his book “The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think […] Read More
“Today…every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.” John F. Kennedy. In the 1950’s and 1960’s citizens and schoolchildren in the USA practiced atomic bomb drills, and nuclear […] Read More
Democracy is withering. A majority of people in democracies like America, France and others believe that corruption is widespread in government. How has this come about? Author John Macgregor believes it is because our constitutions are rooted in a world no living person can remember, where liberties, elections and separation of powers […] Read More
In his book How Economics Explains the World, author Andrew Leigh describes events that affected the course of world history. These range widely from discussions on Slavery to Climate Change; from War to Artificial Intelligence. In each case the author tries to draw on economic theory to explain why historical events occurred […] Read More
Psychologist and professional grandfather Dr Bob Rich offered this advice to people suffering from climate anxiety: “Do the best you can, then don’t worry”. His advice follows the rich tradition of stoic philosophy. The word stoic in modern usage has devolved to describe people who bottle up their emotions. This interpretation fails […] Read More
With wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, and a looming USA-China conflict over Taiwan, one might ask what factors lead to war especially those that involve the great powers. There are a range of theories but the one that I find most compelling is that proposed by John J. Mearsheimer of the […] Read More
We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine. Yuval Noah Harari Author Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling book Sapiens is about the history of […] Read More
The collapse of society on Easter Island is an oft-repeated cautionary tale of man-made ecocide, which blames an ignorant indigenous population for deforesting the island out of an obsession with stone statue building and greed, leading to societal collapse. But author Paul Cooper’s new book Fall of Civilizations makes a compelling case […] Read More
We’re all busy people nowadays. We’re busy churning out reports or emails or text messages. We skim through incoming messages, reading the ‘important’ ones and disregarding the rest. And so, we have all missed important messages or requests from time to time. Or failed to get the desired responses from our own […] Read More