With his coal-black comedy The Art of Negative Thinking, Norwegian director Bard Breien gleefully eviscerates the phony-baloney, "feel good" psychoanalytic babble that is so often hurled thoughtlessly at the severely disabled. Breien's main character, National Health Psychologist Tori (Kjersti Holmen), embodies this approach. All optimistic saccharine on the surface, but a steamroller underneath, she refuses to tolerate any pessimism, cynicism, depression or anxiety from her patients. The latter include: gorgeous Marta, a mountain climber almost completely paralyzed from a fall; her troubled paramour Gard (Henrik Mestad), grappling with guilt thanks to his direct responsibility for the accident; Lillemor (Kari Simonsen), a shrill and obnoxious, sexagenarian divorcee saddled with a neck brace and constantly tossed the "shit bag" in therapy - a tea cozy used as a means of disposal for her complaints; and Asbjorn (Per Schaaning), a stroke victim. All of these patients can deal with Tori's positivism - more or less. But not so with Geirr (Fridtjov Saheim), a paraplegic from an accident who spends his days drowning himself in booze, chain-smoking cigarettes, and listening to depressing Johnny Cash ballads. When Geirr's wife learns of Tori's methods and decides to bring the good doctor to the house to help rehabilitate her husband, it sets the stage for a battle of positive versus negative thinking, that threatens to explode into full-scale cataclysm.
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Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Over the years, whole libraries of pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) texts have been issued by commentators on “the Taiwan problem,” or the PRC’s desire to annex Taiwan. These documents have a number of features in common. They isolate Taiwan from other areas and issues of PRC expansion. They blame Taiwan’s rhetoric or behavior for PRC actions, particularly pro-Taiwan leadership and behavior. They present the brutal authoritarian state across the Taiwan Strait as conciliatory and rational. Even their historical frames are PRC propaganda. All of this, and more, colors the latest “analysis” and recommendations from the International Crisis Group, “The Widening
From a nadir following the 2020 national elections, two successive chairs of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) and Eric Chu (朱立倫), tried to reform and reinvigorate the old-fashioned Leninist-structured party to revive their fortunes electorally. As examined in “Donovan’s Deep Dives: How Eric Chu revived the KMT,” Chu in particular made some savvy moves that made the party viable electorally again, if not to their full powerhouse status prior to the 2014 Sunflower movement. However, while Chu has made some progress, there remain two truly enormous problems facing the KMT: the party is in financial ruin and
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