Frank Hecker

A little while ago I wrote about the Taiwanese political drama Wave Makers (now streaming on Netflix), and speculated on its impact on China. It turns out that its more immediate impact was on Taiwan itself, as the ruling Democratic Progressive Party finds itself embroiled in an ongoing scandal that echoes a #MeToo subplot in Wave Makers. (HT to James Turnbull for alerting me to this.)

When the show was originally released, President Tsai Ing-wen of the DPP tweeted, “I hope you all enjoy this peek into the workings of Taiwan’s democracy.” I guess she’s not enjoying it as much right now.

A while back I commented on what I thought was a deliberate Taiwan government strategy to build “soft power” by funding films and TV series highlighting LGBTQ stories. Now comes an even more explicitly political TV series out of Taiwan, one that was publicly endorsed by Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen.

Wave Makers is an eight-episode Netflix series focusing on the press and PR team (the “wave makers” of the title) working on a (fictional) Taiwanese presidential campaign. In a way it’s a Taiwanese equivalent of US shows like The West Wing and House of Cards, and like those shows is slanted and unrealistic in various ways both large and small. However, unlike the US, Taiwan faces an existential threat, and that makes Wave Makers more interesting — and more vital — than any US political drama might be. What follows is my (mostly) spoiler-free analysis of the show and its significance.

Recently @shel promoted the idea of paying attention to your local library board. Her comments can be extended to cover all things local.

There are always exceptions, but to a first approximation every minute you spend reading or (especially) tweeting about national politics is probably a bad use of your time, and every dollar you spend contributing to national political campaigns (or to political campaigns in other states) is probably a bad use of your money. Even if you “live on the Internet,” what happens in your neighborhood, town, city, county, or state affects you, negatively or otherwise -- and these days it's more often negatively than otherwise for many people.

So, what should you do?

This post — and some future ones as well — was prompted by a book I once read about the prospects for creating a new university, as well as by general comments I've read about admissions policies at elite universities. Since I am decidedly not an expert on issues of higher education, I decided to approach this from the other direction: as a naïve observer doing a "spherical cow" analysis (as physicists like to call it), abstracting away all the complexity and seeing what results from analyzing a problem in as simple terms as possible.

Canadian higher education expert Alex Usher once referred to elite universities as the "apex predators" of the academic world, based on their continued appearances at the top of world rankings. With that in mind, let's look at Harvard in particular, one of the best known and most elite universities, and consider it as we would a biological organism. What are its main characteristics, and how does it survive?