It’s a bold filmmaking choice to have a countdown clock on the screen for most of your movie.In the best-case scenario for a movie like Mercy, in which a Los Angeles detective has to prove his innocence to an artificial intelligence judge within said time limit, it heightens the tension. Who hasn’t
How many tiny pieces of plastic are currently inside your body? A series of headline-grabbing studies in the last few years have claimed to have found microplastics throughout human bodies — inside blood, organs and even brains.However, some of this research has recently come under stinging criticis
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Secretary-General Xi Jinping (習近平) has effectively decapitated the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) leadership, with his purges finally taking down Zhang Youxia (張又俠), the last PLA general with widespread power and respect. Speculation is rife on why this is happening, wh
Dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s (艾未未) famous return to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been overshadowed by the astonishing news of the latest arrests of senior military figures for “corruption,” but it is an interesting piece of news in its own right, though more for what Ai does not understa
As Kevin Wang (王可), the translator to Terao Tetsuya’s (寺尾哲也) Spent Bullets (子彈是餘生) points out in his afterword to the novel’s English version, during the 1960s and 1970s, there was a popular saying in Taiwan: “Come come, come to National Taiwan University; leave, leave, leave for the USA.” Tetsuya i
As the new robot called Sprout walks around a Manhattan office, nodding its rectangular head, lifting its windshield wiper-like “eyebrows” and offering to shake your hand with its grippers, it looks nothing like the sleek and intimidating humanoids built by companies like Tesla.Sprout’s charm is the
On the gray-skied morning of Dec. 21, a black luxury series BMW pulled into the parking lot of the oldest residence in Yilan County, a government-designated “historical building” amid the tranquil rice paddies just off Provincial Highway 9. Wu Ding-guo (吳定國), the 73-year-old founder and CEO of FineT
An emaciated and apparently blind man stands in the snow at the Nazi concentration camp of Flossenbuerg: the image seems real at first but is part of a wave of AI-generated content about the Holocaust.As the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day yesterday, experts have been warning th
William Liu (劉家君) moved to Kaohsiung from Nantou to live with his boyfriend Reg Hong (洪嘉佑).“In Nantou, people do not support gay rights at all and never even talk about it. Living here made me optimistic and made me realize how much I can express myself,” Liu tells the Taipei Times.Hong and his frie
In the American west, “it is said, water flows upwards towards money,” wrote Marc Reisner in one of the most compelling books on public policy ever written, Cadillac Desert. As Americans failed to overcome the West’s water scarcity with hard work and private capital, the Federal government came to t
Jan. 26 to Feb. 1Nearly 90 years after it was last recorded, the Basay language was taught in a classroom for the first time in September last year. Over the following three months, students learned its sounds along with the customs and folktales of the Ketagalan people, who once spoke it across n
As Taiwan’s second most populous city, Taichung looms large in the electoral map. Taiwanese political commentators describe it — along with neighboring Changhua County — as Taiwan’s “swing states” (搖擺州), which is a curious direct borrowing from American election terminology. In the early post-Martia
Towering high above Taiwan’s capital city at 508 meters, Taipei 101 dominates the skyline.The earthquake-proof skyscraper of steel and glass has captured the imagination of professional rock climber Alex Honnold for more than a decade. Tomorrow morning, he will climb it in his signature free solo st
A team of scientists announced Tuesday they have developed new deep-sea landers specifically to test their contentious discovery that metallic rocks at the bottom of the ocean are producing “dark oxygen.”If a previously unknown source of oxygen has always been lurking in Earth’s depths, it would rep
Lines between cop and criminal get murky in Joe Carnahan’s The Rip, a crime thriller set across one foggy Miami night, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.Damon and Affleck, of course, are so closely associated with Boston — most recently they produced the 2024 heist movie The Instigators there — th
The 68th annual Grammy Awards will take place Feb. 1 at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. This year marks a return to normalcy after the award show last year was altered to focus on supporting relief efforts following the devastating Los Angeles-area wildfires.“I think we will see some history-ma
Imagine hundreds of thousands of angry protesters filling the streets, shouting slogans to vent their fury. American diplomats holed up in the highly fortified American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) complex, each silently thanking their predecessors for having the foresight to build security from the gr
Today Taiwanese accept as legitimate government control of many aspects of land use. That legitimacy hides in plain sight the way the system of authoritarian land grabs that favored big firms in the developmentalist era has given way to a government land grab system that favors big developers in the
The murkiness of memory that has obscured Taiwan’s White Terror period was captured by A Foggy Tale (大濛), which scooped four gongs at the 62nd Golden Horse Awards in November. The film depicts a girl’s journey to claim the remains of her older brother — executed by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT
RSS