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Articles by Owen Schaefer
‘The Hot Spot’ is the Japanese Comedy-Drama We Need
REVIEW Bakarhythm’s script mixes the humdrum and the absurd in a hilarious and maybe even quietly subversive story Press enter or click to view image in full size You could be forgiven for dismissing The Hot Spot on Netflix as low-budget sci-fi fare, with its poster image of a massive flying saucer hovering over Mount Fuji, and actress Ichikawa Mikako peering over her shoulder in apprehension. And if a low-budget invasion story is what you were hoping for, you’ll certainly be disappointed.
The Arboreal Trolls of Sycamore Gap
The trial is over. The verdict: guilty. And the tree at Sycamore Gap is still gone. Regrowing, perhaps, but never to be the same. In the early hours of 28 September, 2023, under the cover of Storm Agnes, two men cut down one of the world’s most famous trees — a sycamore that had stood next to Hadrian’s Wall for a century and a half. When the news began to break that morning, it circled the world.
Netflix's 'Ranma 1/2' Gives New Life to the Original High School Anime
TELEVISION This new adaptation of Rumiko Takahashi’s iconoclastic manga is still hilarious, and surprisingly relevant For a moment, I thought I’d imagined it. Flipping through my ‘suggested’ shows on Netflix, I spotted Ranma 1/2. “Well, that’s a throwback!” I thought. “Is Netflix really airing a thirty-year-old anime?” But, no. Ranma 1/2 arrives with a shiny new remake for 2024. And so far, it is awesome. It has been more years than I care to think about since I was obsessed with this anime.
Aurorae Offers Flashes of Brilliance in New Media Art
Member-only story REVIEW|ART This group show by CaptiArtX at the new art’otel Hoxton is flawed but still fascinating Owen Schaefer · Follow Published in Counter Arts · 7 min read · -- Image of ‘Plastic Bloom’ by Diana Chicaiza (aka Klimate) at art’otel Hoxton, Photo: Owen Schaefer, 2025 The only entrance to art’otel Hoxton seems to be through the bar. I had wandered around both sides of the circular building, thinking there must be a more hotel-like entrance — a front desk, a lobby, maybe.
Ways the Universe Might End - But Not Today
Member-only story THOUGHTS Or how my cat is (not) responsible for the heat death of the universe Owen Schaefer · Follow Published in Age of Empathy · 8 min read · -- Photo by Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov on Unsplash Everyone knows you can’t move a sleeping cat. Abui is asleep, and so I cannot move. He has clambered into my lap and then higher, nudging his way up my chest so that I support him with one arm as he nestles into his spot beneath my chin.
Edvard Munch and the Portraits that Watched Over Him
On occasion, seeing a familiar painter through the lens of the National Portrait Gallery can be a strange experience. Particularly if that painter isn’t particularly known for doing portraits. Edvard Munch’s most enduring work, The Scream, has the kind of pop-culture recognition that rivals works like the Mona Lisa and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Most people view Munch as a Post-Impressionist and Symbolist painter first — a painter of emotional and mystical themes.
How the Modern Passport Took Over the World
ESSAY The simplified story of this universal travel document Owen Schaefer · Follow Published in E³ — Entertain Enlighten Empower · 6 min read · -- My Identity. Image by Author ©2009 Owen Schaefer On an eight-day hike through the Cotswolds last summer, I found myself marvelling at the simplicity of travel on foot. Wake up, gather your belongings and set off. No tickets to buy. No queues to join. No security to pass. No passport required. Travel was once simpler, I thought. Travel was once like this.
The Sweetest Psychopath — Why the Season 1 Finale of ‘The Day of the Jackal’ Is a Bullseye
Review Eddie Redmayne stars in the streaming remake of a classic, and interrogates our desire for perfect control Owen Schaefer · Follow Published in Counter Arts · 7 min read · -- The Jackal (Eddie Redmayne). ‘Day of the Jackal’ 2024. Image: SKY/Carnival [This article contains spoilers and begins by revealing the ending of Season 1.
‘Viola’s Room’: Punchdrunk Theatre Draws Us into Daisy Johnson’s Dark Fairytale
Review A work of immersive theatre that takes you into the maze behind its protagonist’s walls Owen Schaefer · Follow Published in Counter Arts · 8 min read · -- The gate to the maze, in ‘Viola’s Room.’ Punchdrunk Theatre, 2024. Photograph Julian Abrams. Have we all had that dream? It’s the one where you find a hidden room in your house. A door you’ve never noticed. A space between the walls that leads to a mansion, a palace, a secret maze, an entire world.
What I Know After Reaching 500 Followers in Eight Months
I have never had 500 followers. Ever. Not on the late Twitter, not Instagram, not Vocal or Reedsy or Tumblr. Not even on Flickr, where I had a loyal following for my particular arty brand of studio photography, self-portraits, and manipulations. That nice, round 500 was a number I never seemed to reach. So, it has been with a certain amount of disbelief that I watched my follower count tick steadily upward for the past eight months. I knew absolutely no one on this site when I signed up.
The Cubic Christmas Lights of Carnaby Street
On Reddit’s r/London, a photo went up announcing “It’s here!” Like the photo above, the image featured a crowd of people packed onto Carnaby Street, phones aloft to take video of the Christmas illuminations as they were turned on. The lights are a collection of six-metre metal boxes in gold, with another set of boxes arranged like a stylised star in the middle.
If People Wrote About Britain the Way They Write About Japan
Satire Or, how to write about a place as if it’s strange and exotic Owen Schaefer · Follow Published in Japonica Publication · 6 min read · -- Old architecture and new. Photo by author ©2024 Owen Schaefer Some clichés have a way of popping up again and again in articles about Japan. ‘Contradictory Japan.’ ‘Japan’s ancient traditions are still alive.’ That kind of thing. Articles that exaggerate normal Japanese things to make them sound more exotic.
‘Waiting for Godot’: Beckett’s Blank Canvas at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket
Review Director James Macdonald strips away the details, letting the characters speak for themselves Owen Schaefer · Follow Published in Counter Arts · 5 min read · -- Ben Whishaw, Tom Edden and Lucian Msamati in Waiting for Godot, Photo: Marc Brenner Beckett was infamously cagey about Waiting for Godot, giving his interviewers only the vaguest answers about its symbolism and meanings. Even the simpler questions, its protagonists’ backgrounds and the location in which it is set, went unanswered.
Why Authors Cross Out Their Names When Signing a Book
Recently, I attended a talk with Margaret Atwood where she discussed her new book of collected poetry, Paper Boat. Her interviewer was the Chinese-British poet, Sarah Howe — and as wonderful as Atwood is, I kept thinking to myself, Why does her interviewer look so familiar? She looked familiar because I had met her. When I got home, I hunted through my poetry shelves, and there it was: Loop of Jade, by Sarah Howe, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Kill Your Dystopia: What two film flops teach about optimism
A few days ago, I went to the opening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, and it was awful. Not because it was strange, but because of the poor storytelling, the leaden dialogue, and the reliance on hoary old clichés. I wrote a rather negative review of the movie for my Pop+ site. I confess that, at times, my negativity borders on the harsh.
Should London's West End Make Money, or Make Room?
In the upstairs bar at St Martin's Theatre, I wasn't drinking - I was reading. The walls are hung with an admirable number of framed newspaper comics, each one poking fun at the long run of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap. What makes it all especially quaint is that some of the comics were drawn while the play was still in its sixth year. Today, The Mousetrap has been running for roughly seventy-one.
Waiting for the Sycamore Gap Trial
"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way." - William Blake, Letter to Reverend John Trusler On the 28th of September, 2023, the news started to spread. A sycamore tree in Northumberland, sitting in a picturesque dip next to Hadrian's Wall, had been felled in the night by vandals. About 41 million trees are cut down every day without more than the usual outcry. But when this one fell, everybody heard it.
At Last, I Live in a Victorian House
It is a normal night. My wife is in the living room, watching television. I'm making dinner - the oven preheating, a pan sizzling on the stove. Then, there is a bang, and we are in the dark. Strange, I think. I mean, this has happened before, but we were running stove, oven, kettle and space heater, and...
5 Overlooked Lessons I Learned From My Cat
Humour The kitty customs you never thought to embrace From their sandpaper tongues to their switchblade toe-beans, we all love our kitty companions. Just this morning, I awoke to the sight of my cat’s tiny pink butthole in front of my face, as the wee moggie plonked down on my chest and faced the other direction. I’ve read that this behaviour means he trusts me. He trusts me so much that he’s willing to let me watch his six. Up close.
(Fiction) Delikatessen
Fiction 100-word flash fiction When they shut down the delicatessen, everything went with it. No rye bread in this town. Cold cuts all just shrink-wrapped ham. I’d have to learn to make knödel by hand if I wanted them, now. I missed my grandmother’s funeral while away on business. The German roots of this village all greyed and falling out. Nothing but Canadian-born kids with kindergarten language skills. Milche, bitte. Danke. For us the Black Forest is just a cake.
(Fiction) Unbridged
Fiction A 100-word flash fiction The street had become a gulf of typhoon water, waist deep. Uncrossable. I didn’t see the old woman slip in. I only saw her climb out again half a block upstream, soaked, one shoe lost, her red handbag floating across to me. I reached and caught it. She shouted something in angry Cantonese, pointing. Three years, and I still couldn’t understand. Could barely count. “I’m sorry!” I yelled, shrugging. There were no bridges. There was no way to meet.
Reinterpreting the Nature of Britain
I think it started with the snails. I can still remember the time I stepped out the door of my first London house and felt the eggshell-crunch of a snail under my foot. I recoiled with a string of curses…
How NOT to Title a Short Story
Avoid the clichés that make readers scroll past A story by any other name So, you have finished your short story, and now you need to give it a name. If you’re anything like me, this is the part you hate. If only we could pull up one of those baby-naming sites and pick something — call this story Nathan and that one Kathleen. But no. Sadly, this is going to take some thought. What makes it worse is that once in a while, you land on that perfect title and you know it.
Did He Jiankui ‘Make People Better’? Documentary spurs a new look at the case of the first gene-edited babies
In the four years since an experiment by disgraced scientist He Jiankui resulted in the birth of the first babies with edited genes, numerous articles, books and international commissions have reflected on whether and how heritable genome editing – that is, modifying genes that will be passed on to the next generation – should proceed. They’ve reinforced an international consensus that it’s premature to proceed with heritable genome editing.
Vaccine Nationalism: Striking the balance
Written by Owen Schaefer and Julian Savulescu This is an updated cross-post of an article published in MediCine On 2 February 2021, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, issues a broadside against COVID-19 vaccine nationalism, calling it “morally indefensible” and “tantamount to medical malpractice at a global scale.” Rich countries representing 16% of the global population have snapped up 60% of the global supply of COVID-19 vaccines.
US scientists push for mitochondrial donation legalisation
US scientists push for mitochondrial donation legalisation 29 April 2019 Appeared in BioNews 996 Scientists and patient advocates are lobbying US lawmakers to allow mitochondrial donation to be used to help avoid severe mitochondrial disease. A Harvard Law School event on 17 April was the first in a series of meetings to persuade the US government to lift the ban on mitochondrial donation.
Video Review: A groundbreaking way to stop mitochondrial disease - TedMed
'Every time somebody decides to have a baby, they're engaging in a game of Russian roulette,' argues Professor Mary Herbert, a reproductive biologist at the University of Newcastle. Around 60-70 percent of fertilised eggs will never make it to pregnancy. You could see simply being here as a sign that we have beaten the odds. 'We are all survivors – well done,' she congratulates the audience.
Video Review: A groundbreaking way to stop mitochondrial disease - TedMed
'Every time somebody decides to have a baby, they're engaging in a game of Russian roulette,' argues Professor Mary Herbert, a reproductive biologist at the University of Newcastle. Around 60-70 percent of fertilised eggs will never make it to pregnancy. You could see simply being here as a sign that we have beaten the odds. 'We are all survivors – well done,' she congratulates the audience.
Australian Senate publishes report on mitochondrial donation
Australia may become the second nation to legalise mitochondrial donation, after its Senate endorsed the so-called 'three-person IVF' technique in a recent report. The technique is already legal in the UK and allows women with mitochondrial disease and their partners have genetically related children, without the risk of passing on the condition.
Is genetic relatedness worth the risks and costs of mitochondrial replacement?
Amid international debate on mitochondrial donation, Singapore's Bioethics Advisory Committee has prompted much discussion nationally over the issue. It has recently opened public consultation on the ethical, social and legal aspects of this innovative intervention. The consultation is mainly intended to inform mitochondrial donation policy in Singapore.
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