Friends,

I’m currently in the middle of teaching a small unit on reviews (of the movie, restaurant, music, etc. variety) in my “English Writing for the Media and the Web in the Age of AI” course. It’s my favorite part of the semester: students get to write about things they really care about and there’s lots of room for the ones who want to shine to do so. One of the examples I use is a 2023 review of the TV show Wave Makers from Taiwan Insight, written by Chieh-Ting Yeh. This line stuck out to me when I read it two years ago:

But in another sense, while the world that “Wave Makers” created is inaccurate, it may actually be what the Taiwanese people prefer their politics to look like. In “Wave Makers”, policy towards a foreign country is not an existential issue and does not overshadow all the other important issues from the public square. Rival politicians can debate immigration and environmental policies, fend off student protesters, and even dig up each others’ scandals without worrying about what anyone in Beijing or Washington says.