“The biggest miracle was getting nine broadcast series scheduled,” Wolf says in our mid-April conversation. “The bigger miracle will be getting all nine of them renewed.”
Spoiler alert: The miracle happened right on cue, just as the television industry prepared to gather this week in New York for the first traditional upfronts week since the television landscape was upended by the arrival of Disney+, HBO Max, Apple TV+ and others.
In a country better known for its sushi, sashimi and noodle dishes, the simple roasted sweet potato – or yaki-imo – doesn't garner as much attention. But this hearty vegetable, yet another import in a sizeable list of historical introductions to the island nation (ramen, for example), has long been a beloved winter snack eaten in the cold months after its harvest. A favourite in Japan since the 1600s, yaki-imo's moist, chewy texture and burnt-caramel scent still inspire nostalgia – as do the trucks that are gradually disappearing as sweet potato sales move to convenience stores and supermarkets.
It’s nearly impossible to define kueh (sometimes written as kuih), the genre-bending dessert/snack that exists across Southeast Asia—specifically throughout Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.
You probably have an insulated cup, either given as a gift or purchased on your own, tucked inside the depths of your cabinet. Over the past decade or so, few home goods as humble as this have gotten as much shine. Thanks to wildly popular brands like Yeti, the multibillion dollar “hydration” market is dominated by vacuum-insulated cups that make bold promises about how long they can keep your water cold — and coffee hot — and everyone’s obsessed with them.
In 1966, Boston’s public television station produced two groundbreaking TV shows in the same studio.
One was Julia Child’s “The French Chef.” The other was “Cooking with Joyce Chen.”
A half-century later, almost 20 years after her death, Child still looms larger than life in American culture — she’s even the subject of a new HBO series — while Chen, who died in 1994, has largely faded into the mist of Chinese American history.
It’s a culture that seems to carry over practices virtually unchanged over millennia, yet embraces the new relentlessly, an island nation that dwelled in enforced isolation for centuries, yet eagerly adapted the foreign when available, from shock doctrine Western industrialization after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 to the packs of leather-clad, 1950s-style rockers I would see gathering in Yoyogi park on Sunday afternoons. Land of contrasts and all that. Tread carefully here, and know the many, many things you don’t know.
But there are certain aspects of Japan that are clear to anyone, even a young reporter on his first night in the country, dropped off the Narita Airport shuttle at the lobby of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. One of those things is the coming of the cherry blossoms. Every spring on Japan’s four main islands, from the bottom reaches of Kyushu to the southern tip of Hokkaido, the country pauses to witness the sakura, the brief flowering of the cherry blossoms. It’s a moment, a few days at most, when a country that otherwise feels as though it is in perpetual motion, comes to a halt to engage in hanami — gathering to see the blossoms, well, blossom.
But as an examination of mental health, of how physics and art and consciousness all have their role to play in it — are indeed intertwined with it — and as a novel of ideas that also creates a fully fleshed narrator with a convincing inner life, “The Red Arrow” succeeds. It is a beguiling and ruminative synthesis of strange couplings: art and physics, psychology and psychedelics, characters and ideas.
A house where no one lives
needs someone to draw it full of glass,
then smash that glass to bits.