by Aseem Gupta | May 31, 2025 | Society, Culture & Demographics
South Korea’s fertility rate is rising. In almost any other context, that would sound like unambiguously good news. After reaching a record low of 0.72 children per woman in 2023, the country’s total fertility rate increased to 0.75 in 2024 and then to 0.80 in 2025....
by Aseem Gupta | May 28, 2025 | Economics, Markets & Money
On Christmas Eve in 1969, Norwegian authorities announced that Phillips Petroleum had discovered oil beneath the North Sea. The field, later named Ekofisk, was enormous. Commercial production began in 1971, followed by a succession of discoveries that transformed...
by Aseem Gupta | May 25, 2025 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, is Kurt Vonnegut’s account of war, survival, death, and the difficulty of making sense of experiences that resist ordinary explanation. Its central character, Billy Pilgrim, is an American soldier who survives the Allied...
by Aseem Gupta | May 21, 2025 | Narrative, Media & Storytelling
Disney live-action remakes are easy to mock. They look like the safest possible products: familiar titles, familiar songs, familiar characters, familiar marketing hooks, and a built-in audience of parents who grew up with the originals. From the outside, the strategy...
by Aseem Gupta | May 18, 2025 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit begins with a familiar expectation of hell and then removes almost everything conventionally associated with it. There are no flames, demons, racks, or instruments of torture. Instead, three dead people are placed together in a respectable...
