I first came to Kyoto in 1999 for university. My first jobs out of school were here. My second daughter was born here. I lived in a dorm, four apartments, and a house, all in different areas of t...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2023/09/30/why-kyoto-is-the-way-it-is/
Today is the 50th anniversary of the coup of Chilean president Salvador Allende, under which the legendary Project Cybersyn was initiated. Cybersyn is an oft-referred to hypothetical in the socia...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2023/09/09/the-santiago-boys-a-podcast-series-by-evgeny-morozov/
In the mid-seventeenth century the nobles of Europe were thrown into an addiction crisis. With the fall of the Ming Dynasty, and the chaos that ensued, where were they to get fine porcelain to de...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2021/09/30/review-of-the-art-of-emptiness/
It was 1993, the beginning of the Clinton years. The Wall had come down and Yeltsin had gone up onto the tank. No longer impeded by a curtain of iron, there were now fifteen new “FSU” states ...
The Arashiyama bamboo grove is one of those must-go places when you visit. Located in the west of the city, at the foot of Mount Arashiyama, it is a major tourist area offering all the amenities ...
I wrote a review of the recently published English translation of Nakamura Tetsu’s book Providence Was with Us: How a Japanese Doctor Turned the Afghan Desert Green. You can read the review on ...
I reflected on the year using Pat Kua’s End of Year Retrospective Template. I won’t share all my results here, just a bit of a roundup below, but the questions from that document I really app...
Books On Asia asked reviewers to pick their top books for 2020. I submitted my four along with the other contributors and gave a short comment. Below is a more fleshed out review. For more review...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2020/12/21/from-the-ruins-of-empire/
It has been busy recently for Japan’s three disputed territories. Early in October China opened a new digital museum about the Senkaku Islands, and China has had coast guard vessels near the Se...
For a book with “how” in the title, there is not much instruction. Better Living Through Criticism is more of a “watch me think about art, pleasure, beauty, and truth” which is much more ...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2020/11/03/articulate-noise-review-of-better-living-through-criticism/
First of all, this is not really review of Matt Alt’s new book Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World. The book is great, it is a fun romp through Japanese history using ...
I have finally finished Emily Thomas’s short book The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad. I started this fun little read in the summer on my last trip to Kyoto, and held off on finishing it...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2020/09/27/whats-your-travel-philosophy/
It has been a couple years since I did a year-end roundup of books and film. This year was one of ups (finally travelled to India) and downs (lost my last living grandparent), of self-reflection ...
Alex Kerr’s latest book Another Kyoto is another take on an old city, but in an old sort of way. Those of us who read a lot of historical work are conditioned to diligently check each footnote ...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2019/09/30/walking-and-talking-a-review-of-another-kyoto/
The Just King: The Tibetan Buddhist Classic on Leading an Ethical Life by Jamgön Mipham Take a moment to think of the good leaders that you have had in your life and/or career. Think of the qual...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2019/08/15/trickle-down-ethical-leadership/
James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) contains two essays. The first, a letter to Baldwin’s teenaged nephew, served as inspiration for Between the World and Me which I extolled not only f...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2019/02/23/review-of-the-fire-next-time/
This weekend I finally sat down to watch Shinkai Makoto’s breakout anime hit of 2016 「君の名は。」Your name.. It was an entertaining story with some nice twists, great voice acting, and...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2017/10/02/remembering-through-facsimile/
Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society is a collection of essays reviewing famous thinkers’ (Deleuze, Freud, Arendt, Ehrenberg, et alia) thinking about the ailments of society in an attempt to ...
Since the age of 3, I have been interested in other peoples. Apparently that was the age when I toddled up to the television, pointed to the evening news, and stated: “I am going to Tokyo.” A...
The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter By default, any book claiming to be a history of “white” people must necessarily be a history of “race science.” Surely one must clearly ...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2017/02/20/a-hypercompetitive-race-review-of-the-history-of-white-people/
2016 has been a tumultuous year, for both the entire world and for me personally. I have categorized some of the best hits and big changes below into three categories: Life, Posts and Media. Life...
Each quarter I do a quick roundup of the book and film reviews that I do on Goodreads and Letterboxd. These reviews are too short and too off-the-cuff to be included with the more in depth review...
Historical drama can sometimes be dangerous. Subtle twists of creative license to fit a narrative can give a false impression of the facts. Osamu Tezuka’s massive 8 volume series on the life of...
Each quarter I do a quick roundup of the book and film reviews that I do on Goodreads and Letterboxd. These reviews are too short and too off-the-cuff to be included with the more in depth review...
Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff Power corrupts and money ruins everything. These are basically the premises that Douglas Rushkoff...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2016/09/21/throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus/
When I think of my long struggle to “try and be a writer”, my confidence is shattered upon reading such a poetic, insightful, heartfelt piece as this. This is writing — the naked intimacy o...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2016/08/28/listening-in-a-short-review-of-between-the-world-and-me/
Each quarter I do a quick roundup of the book and film reviews that I do on Goodreads and Letterboxd. These reviews are too short and too off-the-cuff to be included with the more in depth review...
Each quarter I do a quick roundup of the book and film reviews that I do on Goodreads and Letterboxd. These reviews are too short and too off-the-cuff to be included with the more in depth review...
Each quarter I do a quick roundup of the book and film reviews that I do on Goodreads and Letterboxd. These reviews are too short and too off-the-cuff to be included with the more in depth review...
This year was one of community, organizing and living better. After breaking down my current interests in a recent post, a pattern of community organizing and social activity is apparent. 2015 wa...
Each quarter I do a quick roundup of the book and film reviews that I do on Goodreads and Letterboxd. These reviews are too short and too off-the-cuff to be included with the more in depth review...
Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age by Taylor Owen From the book: Coupled with the power that is derived by the state’s increasing sophistication in this space — whet...
Each quarter I do a quick roundup of the book and film reviews that I do on Goodreads and Letterboxd. These reviews are too short and too off-the-cuff to be included with the more in depth review...
Photo: Residential buildings in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Darley Shen/Reuters. In late February, Under the Dome, a documentary by former television news anchor and investigative journalist Chai Jing...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2015/05/07/chinas-inconvenient-truth/
Each quarter I do a quick roundup of the book and film reviews that I do on Goodreads and Letterboxd. These reviews are too short and too off-the-cuff to be included with the more in depth review...
My review in the Literary Review of Canada is finally released. It is behind a paywall now, but will open up in about a month or so. Or you could pick it up at your local magazine purveyor and su...
How We Got to Now: The History and Power of Great Ideas by Steven Johnson I have mixed feelings about this book. I am a big fan of Steven Johnson, and my familiarity of his work might be why I di...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2015/02/13/an-overly-positive-contribution-a-review-of-how-we-got-to-now/
Cory Doctorow’s new book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free is ostensibly a guide for creators on how to approach the Internet, and does so in an extremely informative, yet conversational ma...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2015/01/03/the-means-of-information/
I logged 40 films and read 57 books in the year 2014. That is really 50 books when you remove the graphic novels, essays and lecture series. Considering my GoodReads Challenge this year was 45 bo...
Books The first book I completed this quarter was Douglas Coupland’s new Kitten Clone: The History of the
Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite by Suki Kim After listening to her emotional interview on CBC’s The Current I quickly bought Suki Kim’s memoir of h...
Each quarter I do a quick roundup of the book and film reviews that I do on Goodreads and Letterboxd. These reviews are too short and off-the-cuff to be included with the more indepth reviews I d...
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters This book is incomplete and thus unsatisfying. It is a condensed version of Peter Thiel’s Stanford cl...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2014/09/28/on-the-contrary-a-review-of-zero-to-one/
Each quarter I do a quick roundup of the book and film reviews that I do on Goodreads and Letterboxd. These reviews are too short and too off-the-cuff to be included with the more indepth reviews...
Each quarter I do a quick roundup of the book and film reviews that I do on Goodreads and Letterboxd. These reviews are too short and too off-the-cuff to be included with the more indepth reviews...
To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov Truthfully, I stayed away from this book. The overwhelming opinion of the popular tech press is that Evgen...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2014/02/11/the-death-of-the-internet/
Below are links to all the off-the-cuff reviews of books and film from this quarter. I didn’t add to my list of more in depth reviews. Reviews from Goodreads (2013) ★★★★☆ Coding Freed...
Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon I have owned this book for more than a year, and now that I have finally read it I have to say it was pr...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2013/12/31/consent-of-the-networked/
See last year’s roundup. Besides work and family, I get enjoyment out of books and film. In terms of books, this year was a pretty serious one for me. I was able to acheive my Goodreads goal (a...
Black Code: The Battle for the Future of Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert Ron Deibert’s book title should probably have the word “tour” in it somewhere, as that is the primary purpose of thi...
https://chadkohalyk.com/2013/11/16/tour-of-duty-a-review-of-black-code/