Author: Tom

Finland joins the new Cold War The good news is that prime minister Sanna Marin was voted out. The bad news is that it doesn’t matter, because, after decades of neutrality even during the Cold War, Finland has joined NATO.  I don’t even know who’s the new Finnish prime minister, but I’m glad that Sanna…

Trying to understand what is going on It seems that just the other day it was the “Transgender Day of Visibility”. Honestly, I wish there was a “Transgender Day of Invisibility” instead, because it seems it’s the only thing we hear about these days. It has become a weird obsession, and something that I must…

Censorship in the age of media unreality Last week, former U.S. president Donald Trump was indicted and may be arrested for a crime, but the curious thing is that it is a crime that no one seems to be able to understand or explain. The media keeps saying it is related to “hush money” paid…

As I start writing this, I am in a high-speed train crossing Europe at 238 km/h. I love trains. Why? I don’t really know. Going up the clouds is nice too, but in general planes are too cramped and give me a sense of claustrophobia, plus there’s the whole security at the airport thing and…

Another chapter in a depressing saga Murder, she wrote — and they rewrote it. “Sensitivity readers” strike again. This time the victim was Agatha Christie. It appears that they removed all mentions to skin colour, race and other physical characteristics from her novels, published by Harper Collins, one of the “Big Five” who, as I…

How would a world ruled by China be? Winston Churchill once famously said that the intentions of (then Soviet) Russia were “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”. Nowadays their intentions are not so mysterious. You may agree or disagree with them, and I suspect most people in the West today will disagree,…

The tough life behind the screen, from directors to child actors The other time I wrote about indie film director Hal Hartley, who was a rising star in the 1990s. So I did a research on his current thereabouts. His apogee seems to have been winning the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes with “Henry Fool”…

Feeling blue in the post-digital world The Criterion Channel, a streaming service of art movies, is doing a retrospective of Isabelle Huppert. So last night I watched again “Amateur” (1994), which is the movie that made me fall in love with the charming French actress who since yesterday has become, hélas, a 70 year-old. Happy…

The curse of being a bibliophile I grew up surrounded by the books of my father’s library. It wasn’t as big as Umberto Eco’s library, but it was enough for me. I never managed to have a very large one myself. Not for lack of books or interest, mind you. I simply moved too much…

It will exponentially increase spam I’ve recently wrote about AI, but perhaps a few more observations are in order. Recently a popular science fiction magazine had to stop accepting submissions due to the huge number of stories written via ChatGPT and similar AI services. I can only imagine what school teachers have to deal with…