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…
Western Samizdat
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…
Travelling by train
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…
Murdering Literature
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…
The mystery of China
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,…
Shooting Stars
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”…
Analog Nostalgia
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…
For the love of books
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…
The real problem of AI writing
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…
Staggering recent numbers about immigration
23% of people in Germany and 21% in Sweden are of “migrant background” According to a recent publication by Germany’s Federal Statistics Office (Statistisches Bundesamt) picked up by the Associated Press, 23% of the people in Germany are immigrants or children of immigrants. 17.3% or 14.1 million are themselves immigrants who have been coming since…