“There was a moment,” says Andrew Nairne, “when I was thinking, of course, we are like Nottingham Contemporary and the Hepworth Wakefield, places like that.” The director of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge is guiding me around a gallery that’s “in rehearsals” for a socially distanced opening in August. “Then I remembered that the others don’t have a little cottage with tiny rooms and narrow corridors.” Today, the National Gallery in London is reopening after COVID-19 abruptly shut the doors of British museums in mid-March. But Kettle’s Yard, like many others, is taking a slower, phased approach. The institution regularly hosts shows in its new, airy galleries — an exhibition from the artist Linder will be extended into the autumn — but at its heart is the home of its founder, curator and collector Jim Ede. This takes the form of a series of knocked-through cottages, their awkward-shaped rooms brimming with art and delicate objects. It is meant to be a warm, hospitable place where visitors are allowed the freedom to sit in armchairs, leaf through books left out on tables and generally feel at home. All of which also makes it a social-distancing nightmare. Visitors have long had to book for a tour round the Edes’ house. They still will, but a maximum of 18, rather than 72, will be able to come each day. Hand sanitizers will be much in evidence, and visor-clad staff will figure out how to steer guests so they clash with neither each other, nor the precious objects. Ventilation has been fiercely debated. “I said, ‘For heaven’s sake, can’t we just fling open some windows?’” Nairne says. The answer was: “On no account.” The gorgeous Alfred Wallis paintings require proper climate control, although the air flow in the cottage has been deemed safe. The cafe, which normally occupies
Taiwan’s artist community was outraged when the authorities banned Lee Shih-chiao’s (李石樵) Reclining Nude (橫臥裸婦) from the 1936 Taiyang Art Exhibition (台陽美術展覽會). The Taiwan Daily News (台灣日日新報) reported that after hours of deliberation, the officials censored the piece for “contravening public morals.” Although the government did have rules on publicly displaying nude art, the state-run Taiwan Fine Art Exhibition regularly featured naked women, allowing more revealing pieces each year. On the same page, the newspaper ran a scathing criticism of the decision by an anonymous artist. “This is completely laughable … If they really thought [Reclining Nude] contravened public morals, they should clearly point out why. If someone feels that such imagery incites lewd thoughts, it just means that they already had a dirty mind. If this painting cannot be exhibited, that means all the famous nude paintings should all be accused of obscenity! I feel that this incident is blasphemous toward art itself, and will hamper the development of Taiwan’s art scene,” the artist wrote. The colonial authorities declined to comment. The kerfuffle actually boosted public interest in the exhibition, and crowds packed the halls for its entire duration. Lee, who was born on July 13, 1908, was a recent graduate of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts then, but he would go on to become one of Taiwan’s most influential painters. ACCEPTANCE OF NUDITY While the nude figure had been a staple of Western art since antiquity, in Asia it was still considered obscene to publicly display such artwork up to the late 19th century. The first time nude art caused a stir in Japan was in 1896, when Seiki Kuroda exhibited a life-size portrait of a woman he completed while studying in France. Critics slammed the piece as corrupting social mores, and a livid Kuroda declared that Japan’s art scene
The plant-based meat from Impossible Foods Inc used to be impossible for home cooks to get their hands on. The product was marketed to chefs such as David Chang and available at restaurants and fast-food spots like Burger King. Consumers could buy their faux burgers — if they could find them — but they couldn’t easily cook them themselves. The pandemic changed that. With more people cooking at home and restaurant accounts gutted, in mid-April Impossible rolled out its product to almost 800 more US supermarkets including Albertsons, Safeway and Wegmans before signing on more than 1,700 Kroger locations in May. That’s up from only 150 stores in March. Impossible is in more than 4,700 stores nationwide, according to the company, and plans to expand its retail footprint to 7,500 by the end of the year; last month it introduced an e-commerce site. (Its major competitor, Beyond Meat Inc, is way ahead; its product has been available in supermarkets since 2016 and is making its first foray into Chinese grocery stores.) Sales of the faux meat have been rising during the pandemic as safety concerns hit meat suppliers and interrupted the supply chain. In the early weeks of the lockdown, alternative-meat product sales rose 264 percent. Consumers bought three times the amount of plant-based foods in March and April than they had the previous year. If you’re one of those converts, the company has released a cookbook to help you figure out what to do with the plant-based product in your refrigerator. Impossible: The Cookbook doesn’t have a recipe for Impossible Whoppers, though it devotes a chapter to the subject along with sliders and patty melts. Traci Des Jardins, a James Beard Award-winning chef and consultant for Impossible, says they considered making an all-burger cookbook, but the “meat” is more versatile than that. COOKING
John Thomson was a pioneering photographer in the 19th century and one of the first to journey to East Asia. In 1871, while in China he met Dr James Laidlaw Maxwell, a fellow Scotsman who was returning to Taiwan, where he served as a Presbyterian missionary. Maxwell’s description of Taiwan intrigued Thomson, and the photographer decided to accompany Maxwell to the island then known to Westerners as Formosa. Disembarking at Takow (today’s Kaohsiung) on April 2, 1871, Thomson brought with him the best photography equipment of his time, along with thousands of glass plates — an estimated 200kg of equipment. The Scotsman only stayed in Taiwan for 16 days, and didn’t travel beyond the southwest, yet the images he captured and the notes he took are valuable historical materials for the research into the Taiwan of that era. “Exploring John Thomson’s footprints in Formosa is a fantastic way to revisit the region’s rich history, geology and ecology. By developing this ‘John Thomson Heritage Walk’ (走讀湯姆生), we hope to raise the local community’s awareness of their ancestral heritage, as well as revitalize cultural assets,” says You Yung-fu (游永福), author of the recently-published John Thomson Formosa (尋找湯姆生:1871臺灣文化遺產大發現) You is a cultural worker who owns a small bookstore called Pumen (普門) in Jiasian Township (甲仙), which is in the hilly interior of Kaohsiung City where he was born and grew up. The book was a labor of love, the result of dedicated research spread over the 18 years since You first heard about Thomson’s visit to Taiwan. You came across Thomson’s photographs while collecting historical materials relating to Pingpu (lowland indigenous) peoples for another project. In his foreword to John Thomson Formosa, historian Douglas Fix says that, from You’s “exhaustive depictions and rich illustrations, we not only know the locations where Thomson got his images,
The princess showed off her tiny realm, sitting peaceful and picturesque, high above the Italian Riviera. But trouble is afoot in the self-declared micronation of Seborga, where a pretender to the “crown” is stoking passionate opposition. The hilltop village, where the Knights Templar are said by locals to have hidden the Holy Grail, insists that documents dating to the 18th century prove it was never legally incorporated into Italy. It hopes its claim will boost tourism and attract new residents, saving it from the fate of other small Italian towns, where depopulation has left historic centers empty and shops closed. Its quest is even more urgent following the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide lockdown, which hit the local economy hard. “I guess every little girl has a dream of being a princess. It’s like a fairytale,” says Nina Menegatto, the village’s first “princess,” who was elected in November, said before the epidemic broke out. When her now ex-husband Marcello abdicated last year during his second seven-year reign, Menegatto ran to become red-roofed Seborga’s first female ruler. The German-born 41-year-old, who manages a property company in Monaco when not attending to official duties, visits her “subjects” carrying her baby in a sling. She giggles as she tries on the gaudy gold crown kept on display in the tourist information office. “I didn’t think I’d ever become a princess. But I got a lot of support from the population and I really appreciate it,” she says. Her May coronation was postponed due to the lockdown but has been rescheduled for Aug. 20 and Menegatto hopes the ceremony will draw fans of royal pomp and circumstance from far and wide. She and her ministers want to reintroduce the local currency, the Luigino, and build a luxury hotel on a nearby outcrop with a view, she says, of four
When the BBC approached Caroline Chia (查慧中) in July 2018, and asked her to make arrangements so a documentary-making team could gather footage showing how global warming may be increasing typhoon intensity, she delivered everything that was in her power to provide. Chia got permission for the BBC crew to shoot inside the Central Emergency Operation Center, film the army’s disaster-relief efforts and follow mayors around as they supervised the cleaning up. “In total, it was about one week of work for my cousin — who’s my business partner — and I,” recalls Chia, who was born in Taipei but raised in Canada. But that summer, for the first time since 1964, no typhoons made landfall in Taiwan. The BBC team never arrived. In accordance with the contract, Chia’s EastWest Entertainment Group didn’t get paid a dollar. Despite that setback, and travel restrictions imposed due to COVID-19, Chia expresses optimism about Taiwan’s future as a location for international TV and film productions. With streaming services like Netflix under pressure to offer original content, she thinks Taiwan’s low costs and other advantages will prompt overseas production companies to follow in the footsteps of Luc Besson (who spent 11 days shooting in Taipei for his 2014 hit movie, Lucy) and Martin Scorsese (who filmed all of 2016’s Silence in Taiwan). Chia did various entertainment industry and media jobs in Taipei before launching EastWest in 2007. “Because I’m bilingual, I chose to focus on bringing shoots into Taiwan. In fact, in the past four years, we’ve not worked on any local productions,” Chia says, adding that she prefers international projects — and not just because the budgets tend to be bigger. “We work the same way, and communication is easier,” she says. Chia says that she worked on independent films and projects but found it
If you think Leaving Virginia is going to be Taiwan’s modern-day version of American Pie, leave after the first 15 minutes. It starts that way, an ode to those hormone-crazed teenage years as Big D (Isaac Yang, 楊懿軒) tries to lose his virginity on his 18th birthday but his Christian girlfriend rejects his advances and storms off. His best friend Zulie (Ng Siu Hin, 吳肇軒), convinces Big D that he will be rendered impotent if he doesn’t lose his virginity by the end of his 18th birthday, setting off the course of events. It feels like the rest of the film will deal with his and his buddy’s attempts to get laid and the mishaps they encounter, but the story takes a morbid — or absurd, depending how you look at it — turn. The press bills Leaving Virginia as a “coming-of-age story of youth” and a “rare examination of teenage sexuality” in Taiwan’s film scene, but it feels more like an irreverent satire of darker themes like desperation, angst and suicide. “I hope that after watching this film, the audience can recall their teenage years growing up and rekindle their passion for life,” director Lin Li-shu (林立書) says, but the results are the opposite. Zulie constantly teases Big D in a very touchy-feely way, stripping his underwear off at school during a livestream, falling on top of him and even ejaculating (or at least pretending to) on his jersey in front of him at one point. He exhibits extreme behavior, stealing money, doing drugs and at one point rides a bike straight into traffic down a winding tunnel with his eyes covered. He pretty much harasses Big D non-stop as the two bicker throughout the film to the point of annoyance. Nobody expects the characters in such a movie to be
Hong Kong’s leader Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) offered scant reassurance Tuesday over a new national security law that critics say undermines liberties and legal protections promised when China took control of the former British colony. A year ago, Hong Kong residents felt secure enough in their freedoms under the territory’s “one-country, two-systems” regime to bring their children to mass protests. Now, after the June 30 implementation of the security law, some are worrying they might be punished for what they post on Facebook, Twitter or even TikTok. Short-form video app TikTok, which has sought to distance itself from its Chinese roots — it is owned by Chinese internet giant ByteDance — said Tuesday it will stop operations in the city “in light of recent events.” Hong Kong was promised 50 years of semi-autonomy after the July 1, 1997, handover. That allowed the city’s 7 million residents to keep a free press and other freedoms forbidden in the communist-ruled mainland. Many of Hong Kong’s older generations fled political upheaval on the Chinese mainland. Younger Hong Kongers grew up expecting to achieve more democracy in their lifetimes. All are struggling to understand the implications of the new law, which prohibits what Beijing views as secessionist, subversive or terrorist activities or as foreign intervention in the city’s internal affairs. “I didn’t have a strong view against formalizing a national security law but the way it was implemented is intrusive and disrespectful,” said Jen Au, who works in the banking industry. “It’s basically just bullying. Hong Kong has come a long way in the last 20 years to warm up to China and this really just backfired.” Lam, the city’s Beijing-backed chief executive, said Tuesday the work of the Committee for Safeguarding National Security she chairs, which oversees enforcement of the law, will not be made public. So implementation rules giving
President Donald Trump’s niece offers a scathing portrayal of her uncle in a new book that credits a “perfect storm of catastrophes” for exposing the president at his worst. Mary Trump, a psychologist, writes that the coronavirus pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression and deepening social divides have brought out the “worst effects” of Donald Trump’s pathologies, which were less evident when the country had a stable economy and the lack of serious crises. Those factors, along with “Donald’s penchant for division, and uncertainty about our country’s future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage,” she writes in Too Much and Never Enough, How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man. Mary Trump is the daughter of Trump’s older brother, Fred Jr, who died after a struggle with alcoholism at 42. In the book, Mary Trump makes several revelations, including alleging that the president paid a friend to take the SATs — a standardized test widely used for college admissions — in his place. She writes that his sister, Maryanne had been doing his homework for him, but she couldn’t take his tests. Donald Trump worried that his grade point average, which put him far from the top of the class, would “scuttle his efforts to get accepted” into the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, which he transferred to after two years at Fordham University in the Bronx. “To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him. That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerized records. Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well.” And she writes, in awe, of Trump’s ability to gain
Tobie Openshaw is confident that Taiwan’s government has good reasons for not including him in the Triple Stimulus Voucher Program, which launched at the beginning of this month. That’s just as well, because it seems unlikely he’ll ever discover the logic by which it was decided that he, along with other foreign residents not currently married to Taiwan citizens, shouldn’t receive the vouchers. “We’ve stood side-by-side with our Taiwanese friends through the COVID-19 crisis, complying with government measures, cheering its success and sharing that news with the world at large. If the stimulus coupons are meant to be spent to keep the economy flowing, we’re more than happy to help spread it around,” says Openshaw, a South African documentary filmmaker who’s lived in Taiwan since 1994. “Surely we deserve a small thank you, just like Taiwan citizens. It’s only [a per person net gain of] NT$2,000, so it’s not about the money,” he adds. Openshaw isn’t alone in thinking that the symbolism matters more than the cash. On June 12, CNA reported that European Chamber of Commerce Taiwan Chairman Giuseppe Izzo had decried the government’s different treatment of foreign nationals versus local citizens, and highlighted the Triple Stimulus Voucher Program as a prime example. The belief that people who live and work in Taiwan should be treated equally when it comes to benefitting from programs which their taxes help fund isn’t universal. Whether it’s shared by the officials who crafted the Triple Stimulus Voucher Program is hard to say, because they’ve shown little willingness to discuss their reasoning. GOVERNMENT RUNAROUND The Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), the department in charge of the voucher program, took nine days to acknowledge a list of questions submitted by the Taipei Times on June 16, and a further eight to provide a detailed response. Even a charitable reading
To go anywhere in Singapore these days, Joni Sng needs mobile phone apps and other technologies: a QR code to enter shops, a digital map to see how crowded a mall or park is, and a tracker to show if she was near someone infected with the coronavirus. For the roughly 5.6 million people in Singapore, these actions are routine as the government eases restrictions placed to contain the spread of the disease. “The apps are quite convenient and easy to use, and I feel a little safer knowing that everyone else is also using them,” Sng, a videographer, said. “It has become very natural to click on the apps while going somewhere, just like wearing a mask,” she said. Singapore, along with Taiwan, South Korea and China, was quick to embrace technology to map the coronavirus outbreak early on with contact tracing, robots and drones. Now, countries and businesses are mandating technologies as people return to work and begin to travel, with apps, scanners, check-in systems, and so-called immunity passports. These are particularly needed in big cities that tend to be more densely populated, with more points of contact for the population, ranging from public transit to bars and restaurants. “As Singapore restarts its economy, data-driven tech solutions will play a crucial role in helping the nation safely and successfully get back on its feet,” Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said in a statement last week. HARM’S WAY COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, has infected more than 10 million people worldwide and killed over 500,000, pushing governments and companies to innovate quickly on everything from quarantines to ventilators. Many have turned to technologies based on big data, such as facial recognition software, that have raised fears of surveillance and privacy risks, but which authorities say are needed to track the disease and keep people safe. China’s health code
Most people experience COVID-19 as a short-term illness — once the infection has been fought off, they bounce back to health. But evidence is emerging of a significant minority — sometimes referred to as “long haulers” — who struggle with long-term symptoms for a month or longer. Anecdotal reports have abounded of people left with fatigue, aching muscles and difficulty concentrating. Online support groups on Facebook and Slack have sprung up, already hosting thousands of members who say they have not got better. Speaking to the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Matt Hancock said it was difficult to gauge the scale of the problem. “This is a really serious problem for a minority of people who have COVID,” the health secretary said. “Some people have long term effects that look like a post viral fatigue syndrome.” Scientists are only just beginning to investigate the potential causes of enduring fatigue, but say that there are likely to be a wide variety of reasons why some people face a longer road to recovery. “Fatigue itself will take on lots of different guises,” said Chris Brightling, professor of respiratory medicine at the University of Leicester, who is leading a newly announced 8.4 million pound study into the long-term health impacts of COVID-19. A report published in February by the WHO, based on preliminary data, suggested that, in mild cases, the median recovery time from COVID-19 is roughly two weeks from the onset of symptoms, and about three to six weeks for severe or critical cases. However, some of those who appear to have only mild illness initially also end up wrestling with symptoms, including fatigue, that linger for weeks or months. Those who have suffered severe illness in the acute phase, including admission to intensive care, typically suffer from muscle loss, which can result in direct physical
When coronavirus claimed its first victim in India’s largest slum in April, many feared the disease would turn its narrow, congested streets into a graveyard, with social distancing or contact tracing all but impossible. But three months on, Mumbai’s Dharavi offers a rare glimmer of hope with new infections shrinking, thanks to an aggressive strategy that focused on “chasing the virus, instead of waiting for disaster,” according to city official Kiran Dighavkar. The sprawling slum has long been a byword for the financial capital’s bitter income disparities — with Dharavi’s estimated one million people scraping a living as factory workers or maids and chauffeurs to Mumbai’s well-heeled residents. With a dozen people typically sleeping in a single room, and hundreds using the same public toilet, authorities realized early that standard practices would be of little use. “Social distancing was never a possibility, home isolation was never an option, and contact tracing was a huge problem with so many people using the same toilet,” Dighavkar said. An initial plan to conduct door-to-door screenings was abandoned after Mumbai’s searing heat and humidity left medical workers feeling suffocated under layers of protective equipment as they combed the area’s cramped alleys for cases. But, with infections rising fast and fewer than 50,000 people checked for symptoms, officials needed to move quickly and get creative. What they came up with was coined “Mission Dharavi.” Each day, medical workers set up a “fever camp” in a different part of the slum, so residents could be screened for symptoms and tested for coronavirus if needed. Schools, wedding halls and sports complexes were repurposed as quarantine facilities that offered free meals, vitamins and “laughter yoga” sessions. Strict containment measures were deployed in virus hotspots that were home to 125,000 people, including the use of drones to monitor their movements and alert police, while a huge army of
With her husband left jobless by the pandemic, the last thing Indonesian mother Juarsih needed was to get pregnant, but now she’s expecting a third child — one of many in the country anxiously preparing for a COVID-fuelled baby boom. Indonesian authorities believe there could be 400,000 more births than usual next year as lockdowns keep couples at home and cut access to contraception, prompting fears of an increase in abortions and stunting of children in poorer families. Juarsih, 41, says her birth control ran out as clinics closed or slashed hours and overwhelmed hospitals struggled to keep up with mounting coronavirus infections in the world’s fourth most populous country. The mother of two teenagers is now too scared of the deadly respiratory disease to risk going out for a pregnancy checkup in her hometown Bandung, on Java island. “At first I was shocked when I found out that I was pregnant,” she said. “I started feeling happy later although there’s still some sadness... I should be grateful but this is happening at a difficult time.” Contraception use has “dropped drastically” since the pandemic took hold across the sprawling archipelago in early March, Hasto Wardoyo, head of Indonesia’s national population and family planning board, said. Health authorities are worried increasing numbers of expectant parents will turn to abortions and push up maternal mortality rates. “We’re also worried about stunting — not all families can afford proper nutrition,” he said. ‘DADS, PLEASE CONTROL YOURSELF’ With access to hospitals and contraceptives difficult, health authorities have been forced to get creative. One campaign saw health workers in government vehicles rolling through communities to announce that now wasn’t the time to have a baby. “You can have sex,” one message blared out as workers trundled through a village. “You can get married. But don’t get pregnant.” “Dads, please control yourself... You can have sex as long
Every time Chen Ding-shinn (陳定信) saw a liver cancer patient in his ward, it reminded him of his father, who died from the disease at the age of 49. Historically, Taiwanese suffered from an unusually high prevalence of liver ailments as well as cancer, and Chen was troubled by the number of terminal patients. After decades of research, Chen and other experts found that Taiwan had the highest percentage of hepatitis B carriers in the world, which often developed into cirrhosis and cancer. In the early 1980s, he served as a key member of the Hepatitis Prevention Council (肝炎防治委員會), which helped Taiwan become the first country in the world to implement a nationwide hepatitis B vaccination program. All newborns in Taiwan were vaccinated in 1986 — six years before the WHO recommended that all countries integrate the vaccine into their national immunization programs. According to the book Hepatitis Combat (肝炎聖戰), today over 179 countries follow the recommendation. Chen died on June 24 of pancreatic cancer at the age of 76. The nation mourned him as the “Liver King” (肝帝, homophonous to the Mandarin pronunciation of Gandhi) and thanked him for saving the lives of generations of Taiwanese. NATIONAL DISEASE Medical experts during the Japanese era already noticed an unusually high occurrence of liver ailments among Taiwanese. But they never found the cause. Chen was born in 1943 in today’s Yingge District (鶯歌), New Taipei City. During his fourth year at National Taiwan University’s College of Medicine, his father was diagnosed with liver cancer, which was considered Taiwan’s “national disease” and leading cause of death at the time. Today, it has been proven that the most common risk for liver cancer is chronic infection of hepatitis B or C, but that connection had yet to be made. In the 1950s, most experts believed that
A Sunday afternoon in lockdown and I am standing at the stove watching molten butter burn, because a nice lady in Manchester told me I must and, right now, I’m extremely suggestible. I’ve already had a traumatic interaction with some pastry that was so short it only held together out of good manners. Now here I am, burning butter. I need help. No, what I really need is a restaurant kitchen full of skilled cooks to do this for me, but that’s not exactly available right now. Do I need tell you that I miss restaurants? I miss their noise and promise and menus and dishwashers. That got me thinking. I can’t bring the restaurant into my home, but perhaps I could bring the food. Wouldn’t that be great? Pick a few of my favorite dishes and scatter them through my week like suddenly-blooming nasturtium seeds. It would be my food fantasies made flesh, and many other food groups besides. DUCK, DUCK, DUCK I start simply with the kind of dish I would once have described pompously, as a “pleasing piece of assembly:” the duck starter served to me at Grazing by Mark Greenaway in Edinburgh. There was a pristine disc of fried duck egg, sunrise-yellow yolk dead center, layered with torn hunks of duck confit, slices of duck ham, fried breadcrumbs and dollops of parsley mayo. Happily, in my south London neighborhood I have shops selling duck eggs, duck confit and flat-leaf parsley. I can’t get duck ham but I can substitute with jamon Iberico. In lockdown we all must make sacrifices. Oh, the humanity. One lunchtime I attempt to put it together and fall at the first hurdle. How the hell do you get a perfect disc out of a fried duck egg, let alone secure the yolk in the middle? And yes, I
Taiwan’s rapid economic development between the 1950s and the 1980s is often attributed to rational planning by highly-educated and impartial technocrats. Those who look at history through blue-tinted spectacles argue that, for much of the post-war period, the government was staffed by Chinese who fled China after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lost the civil war “who had no property interests in Taiwan and no connections with a landlord class,” leaving “the KMT party-state more autonomous from societal influences than governments [elsewhere in East Asia],” writes Gaye Christoffersen in Market Economics and Political Change: Comparing China and Mexico. At the same time, of course, the KMT regime benefited from considerable amounts of US aid, and was able to leverage infrastructure left behind by the Japanese colonial government. Whether the party did a better job than those in charge of South Korea is debatable. When reviewing the final decade of KMT dictatorship, among the names that stand out are Sun Yun-suan (孫運璿, 1913-2006) and Li Kwoh-ting (李國鼎, sometimes known as K.T. Li, 1910-2001). Neither stood in any kind of election, yet both became among the most powerful people in the nation. The official residence of the former and the private home of the latter have been preserved as memorials to the men and their achievements. If you’ve an interest in Taiwan’s recent history, they’re certainly worth visiting. At both, admission is NT$50. A PREMIER’S OFFICIAL RESIDENCE What’s now called the Sun Yun-suan Memorial Museum (孫運璿科技‧人文紀念館) was the official residence, and then the retirement abode, of a man who some think would’ve risen to the presidency were it not for the stroke he suffered in 1984, when he was 71 years old. This handsome two-story building, which blends Western and Japanese architectural styles, was built in the mid-1920s. Sun moved here in 1980,
For those of you who whiled away hours on the sofa watching society crumble in the face of marauding zombies, deadly aliens and infectious diseases — it’s time to reap the rewards. Psychologists have found evidence that fans of apocalyptic movies — where global order is upturned — may be more resilient and better prepared to deal with the coronavirus pandemic than the rest of us. The bleak scenarios thrown up by films such as Contagion, from panic buying and isolation to fear of others and fake claims of miracle cures, appeared to help viewers take the outbreak in their stride and work out how best to handle the crisis. “If it’s a good movie, it pulls you in and you take the perspective of the characters, so you are unintentionally rehearsing the scenarios,” said Coltan Scrivner, a psychologist who specializes in morbid curiosity at the University of Chicago. “We think people are learning vicariously. It’s like, with the exception of the toilet paper shortage, they pretty much knew what to buy,” he added. The researchers questioned 310 volunteers on their movie preferences and viewing histories before asking them how prepared they felt going into the pandemic and what levels of anxiety, depression, irritability and sleepless they had experienced. Horror movie fans appeared less distressed by the crisis than most, but those who favored “prepper movies” — where society collapses — ranked as more resilient and better prepared, both mentally and practically. The finding held when the psychologists controlled for age, sex, how fond people were of movies in general, and personality traits such as neuroticism and conscientiousness. Scrivner suspects many factors are at play. Movies like Contagion, which rocketed in popularity as coronavirus spread, make aspects of the pandemic such as quarantine and supply shortages seem less strange, he believes. “You’ve seen it a hundred times
It was an “angry little book” telling the story of one of the great misunderstood pioneers of medicine that grabbed the attention of Mark Rylance , the Oscar-winning English actor. “I hadn’t known about Semmelweis, his work or the tragic way he was oppressed by the medical authorities,” he said. “But then I picked up a copy of an old French biography, reprinted in translation by a friend of mine at Atlas Press, and found it very moving.” Now Ignaz Semmelweis, the groundbreaking 19th-century Hungarian doctor who discovered that invisible germs can convey deadly disease, will be the acclaimed actor’s next stage role and could also be central to a unique and timely theatrical experiment this summer. The book Rylance chanced upon, Semmelweis: A Fictional Biography by the controversial Louis-Ferdinand Celine and published in 1936, gave a fiery and impassioned version of the life of Semmelweis, charting how he was ignored or derided throughout his career. MISUNDERSTOOD DOCTOR “Working in Vienna, this brilliant immigrant doctor, who was nervous of speaking in public because of his strong Hungarian accent, realized that it was bacteria, which he called ‘cadaveric particles,’ that were infecting patients in their hundreds. He had no microscope, but used reason, observation, deduction and even his sense of smell,” said Rylance, who last year took the idea for a play about Semmelweis to Tom Morris, artistic director of The Bristol Old Vic and one of the devisers of the international stage hit War Horse. Together they created an ambitious production, calling in the writer Stephen Brown to work on a script. “The play is not just about the fact Semmelweis was a genius who came to these conclusions 20 years before Joseph Lister or Louis Pasteur. It is about the way a renegade like that needs other people around them to help communicate. He
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