Project Syndicate is an international non-profit organisation which provides exclusive, original op-eds by experts on a range of current affairs such as geopolitics, economics, and development. Laudably, PS disseminates its articles for free or at a discount to poorer news sources all over the world, which it is able to do thanks to donations, and the subscriptions of more moneyed news organisations. The organisation’s unique model protects against sensationalism and ensures the high quality of its content.

There’s a rickety table in a shop that no one’s put much effort into making welcoming, if you feel like being depressed while you eat. The food itself is edible and cheap, so Ka Lok is at least acceptable for budget sushi takeaway.

From the maker of the superb roguelike Pixel Dungeon, Frostfire is a simple and satisfying match-3 style puzzle game based on a hexagonal grid. As you would expect from developer Oleg Dolya (watabou), the design is elegant and simple. The music is a very nice complement to the gameplay and visual design. It’s a worthwhile time-waster, fun for children and adults.

If you’re going to play a puzzle game in this genre, you may as well make it this one — pay what you want to an indie developer, and enjoy a pure game with no ads.

Currently it’s $1.99 on Google Play, $0.99 on iOS, or pay what you want direct from watabou for Android, Windows or Mac.

Asami’s Durbanville is a sushi and Asian restaurant, which offers a wider range of sushi than other establishments in Cape Town. Takeaways are promptly prepared, and the stylish setting, reminiscent of authentic Japanese sushi bars, is great for a night out. The food isn’t amazing but it is probably the best sushi you will find in the Northern Suburbs.

Democracy Now! is one of the best-known progressive news sources in the United States. It has been around since 1996 and is distributed online as well as through broadcast television and radio. It is identified strongly with co-founder, principal host and executive producer Amy Goodman, an investigative journalist known for courageous confrontations with powerful economic and political forces. Most recently, Amy Goodman was in the news because an arrest warrant was issued against her in connection with her reporting on the Dakota Access Pipeline. The case was quickly dismissed but helped bring further attention to the protests.

The organization running the show is a non-profit, though it does not appear to publish an Annual Report (none is listed on the website, and an email request has so far not been answered). Its revenue for 2014 was $6,674,958, so the lack of transparency about impact, strategy and spending is a bit unusual for an organization of this size. Indeed, Charity Navigator rates it at two stars for accountability and transparency, due to the lack of audited financials or information about its board of directors.

The primary content the organization produces is a Monday-to-Friday one hour broadcast (in English, with some content translated to Spanish) that typically consists of news and interviews. With a progressive lens, the show gives more attention to issues that typically only get second-tier coverage in mainstream media, such as international efforts to combat climate change, or left-wing social movement activism. This is done in a dry and muted “just the facts” tone.

The show is always smart, sometimes tedious (interview guests are hit or miss; breaks with music or monotonic monologue are not for everyone), sometimes engaging (like when it tackles challenging conversations, such as discussions about third party candidates).

An example of clever journalism, even if one disagrees with it: during the 2016 election, Democracy Now! staged a reenactment of one of the US presidential television debates, giving third party candidate Jill Stein (who was not permitted to participate) the opportunity to answer the same questions the main candidates were asked. (The libertarian candidate was also invited, but could not make it.)

The overall curation of topics is quite remarkable, and the emphasis on stories not receiving attention by major media makes Democracy Now! a good addition to any news and information mix, if the video/audio format works for you. There is textual content on the site, but much of it is transcripts or very short blurbs.

Personally, I prefer to read the news, as do young people who have grown up with the web. But the Democracy Now! broadcast reaches audiences who may not be deft navigators of the web, and therefore is an important part of the US political media landscape.

The online version of the show does offer links to different segments and transcripts so you don’t have to watch to or listen to the whole show. But of course content that is native to the web offers many other possibilities that are underutilized in a TV/radio show transported to the web – conversation and participation, interactive data and charts, cross-referencing, embedded videos, tweets and other content, and so forth. This also gives Democracy Now! a disadvantage in social media that rely on content that’s optimized for being shared.

The Verdict

Democracy Now! is a fine example of viewer-supported journalism. It is constrained by its format and perhaps to an extent by its ambition. It is a brainy daily roundup that appeals to people who already self-identify as progressive, but is unlikely to convince people who are not. Many will background the broadcast to other activities rather than intently listening for an hour (a podcast version is available).

The lack of organizational transparency is disappointing for a non-profit, though not surprising for an organization that’s clearly monomaniacally focused on its mission. In spite of those reservations, Democracy Now! deserves four stars for its tireless dedication to quality journalism and to the pursuit of major stories and topics that are neglected elsewhere. Even if you don’t identify with the (by US standards) far left political lens of the broadcast, including frequent spotlighting of third party candidates, it enriches our perspective on the world in ways other sources rarely do.

David Mitchell loves to write books that challenge him as a writer, and writing historical fiction about a Dutch trading post in the bay of Nagasaki certainly qualifies – especially without writing in Dutch or Japanese, while still trying to maintain an air of authenticity in the language and dialect.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet succeeds, for the most part, in transporting the reader, and if you like where Mitchell is taking you, you’ll enjoy the ride. Occasionally, he overdoes it with prose that seems written mostly to amuse himself (“A smoke-dried Dane makes a Finn’s cock of a tangled vang”) or that is just a bit too experimental.

The central plot in Autumns borrows heavily from Mitchell’s own work – a group of women are drugged, enslaved, exploited, and lied to about their eventual fate. This also happened to the fabricants in Cloud Atlas, and Somni-451’s rescue included similar plot twists.

In Autumns, Orito uncovers part of the evil plot, but not the entirety of it (that is left to the male characters); like Somni-451 in Cloud Atlas, she seems to represent an ideal of both innocence and wisdom.

Towards the end of the novel, a whole new cast of characters, the crew of the HMS Phoebus, is introduced. We only get a brief glimpse into their motivations, and learning about the captain’s gout or the rivalry between the lieutenants seems like a distraction from the fate of the protagonists.

Mitchell couldn’t resist the temptation to weave a highly fictionalized version of this interesting historical incident into the novel - but I would much rather have spent more time with Orito, revealing perhaps more of her humanity rather than a less interesting and more stereotypical transition from victimhood to sainthood.

AssaultCube is a first-person shooter game for PCs (GNU/Linux, Windows and macOS) that is free software, with the caveat that some media assets are nonfree. Apart from that, the game is a lot a fun. It seems to mimick the good old days of Counter Strike when it was just a Half-Life mod, and that’s great! It’s one of the few libre, realistic FPS games out there.

At first you dabble a bit to actually hit players online. The fast pace does not make it easy for newcomers to shoot straight, but if you stay with it for a while, your skills will improve in quite a satisfactory way, which I suppose can be said about most things.

Sure, you may shake your head at characters falling from great heights and remaining with full health (not that realistic, eh?), or the lack of good graphics and animations such as you’d find in AAA games, but considering this one is gratis, runs everywhere and entertains you for hours, it’s well worth a shot.

Incognito ties some interesting studies and anecdotes about human cognition together with opinions and hypotheses that are at times cringeworthy. The most problematic part of the book is Eagleman’s set of proposed reforms for the criminal justice system, which range from prefrontal cortex training for offenders to the suggestion that teenagers might be deserving of harsher physical punishment because their brains are still malleable. Here, Eagleman is guilty of the same simplistic, reductionist thinking that he later reminds us not to apply when dealing with high complexity systems.

Leaving aside all the other issues with his proposals, two points. First, any form of criminal justice impacts not only the population of offenders. Deterrent effects on would-be offenders, perception of fair treatment, and even impact on society as a whole need to be considered (as an extreme example of the latter, we can all imagine that a society that administers public crucifixions is shaped by that practice, irrespective of its impact as a deterrent).

Second, our sense of right and wrong is deeply informed by everything that happens around us: what our parents tell us, what our peers tell us, what the media tell us, and what’s actually going on. Would we recommend applying Eagleman’s “prefrontal cortex training” to a child soldier in an environment where violence is normalized? Of course not: we would argue that our priority should be to take the child out of a bad environment, and to address the root causes. Then we should also be careful to understand the micro-environments that exist within society, due to a history of racial and gender inequality, failed drug policies, and poverty.

Now, imagine an approach like the one Eagleman proposes being applied to, for example, the school-to-prison pipeline that exists in the United States and predominantly impacts children of African-American background. Will those teenagers be helped by harsher punishment because their brains still have the neuroplasticity to learn? Of course not – that will only further reinforce broken trust, and normalize “might makes right” as the standard of social behavior.

Where Eagleman writes about societal issues, he is out of his depth, and his suggestions come across as naive at best and dangerous at worst. That doesn’t render the whole book ineffective. He is a persuasive writer, the science is interesting, and some of his conceptual vocabulary (“team of rivals”, “alien/zombie systems”) is very well-chosen to bring his points across. Overall, the book is a light read, and those who have ventured into the depths of neuropsychology even a little bit will find much of it to be familiar.

Peppered with strong, revolutionary names, the songs written by Citizens of the Empire are restless and beautiful. These Minneapolis anarchists produce quality post-rock under a free license (CC BY), which is really the cherry on top.

It’s hard to properly describe it, but the music is instrumental, melodic and thoroughly entrancing. If post-rock is your cup of tea, give it a try! Their bandcamp page allows gratis downloads too, but if you like it, consider getting them a pint of beer :)

Portland has become a mecca for all things hip and cool lately. Unfortunately it has made national news lately because of the Rioting, but normally it is a pretty chill place. I was born here and I still live here. The housing market is kinda messed up right now because everyone is moving from California and pricing everyone out. The Portland Timbers Football Club is essentially a religious cult. Also, voodoo doughnuts are HIGHLY overrated.