Showing 1 - 7 of 7
Rich tapestry of Thai society
Life, Pimrapee Thungkasemvathana, Published on 02/02/2015
» All things considered, the 14 stories in the collection translated by Marcel Barang read like a list of social issues a Thai should be aware of: participating in last year's protests without genuine understanding and interest; having an affair with someone of an opposing political colour; the death of red-shirt poet Mai Nueng; violence in the South; hilltop villages; the move from local farms to factory farming. And Buddhism.
Chewing the fat of morality
Life, Pimrapee Thungkasemvathana, Published on 06/05/2015
» The Lykov family retreated from civilisation in 1936. For four decades, they lived in isolation, in a home made from scavenged materials. They had no knowledge of World War II, of the atomic bombs, of the first landing on the Moon. They had prayer books and an old Bible to read. When these Old Believers fled into the Siberian taiga, the family consisted of four. The couple had two more children, who before their discovery by geologists in the summer of 1978 had never met anyone else.
The ghost of pop culture future
Life, Pimrapee Thungkasemvathana, Published on 08/08/2014
» Last month, Thai fans had their first Comic Con experience, when BEC Tero and TrueVisions hosted the Bangkok Comic Con at Paragon Hall, an event local devotees of all things pop culture welcomed with delight.
The leader's true self
Life, Pimrapee Thungkasemvathana, Published on 24/11/2014
» 'A few months ago, the [North Korean] Ministry of Interior issued a statement on TV — 'We will remove your existence from the universe'," says Jang Jin-sung, unfazed, over a decade after he fled North Korea in the middle of the day, across the frozen Yalu River and into China.
Illustrating the ideal
Life, Pimrapee Thungkasemvathana, Published on 10/02/2015
» As a child, Tatchamapan Chanchamrassang, aka Pomme Chan, was a nerd, she says. She used to read manga comics and then she starting making up her own stories and drawing her own manga. She loved Ai Yazawa's Nana.
Replacing statistics with narratives
Life, Pimrapee Thungkasemvathana, Published on 05/11/2014
» I spent my Halloween weekend shuffling between panels at the Singapore Writers Festival, listening to horror stories. I had been assigned to attend sessions on a variety of discourses, from jazz and poetry to writing about the female body. Instead, I found myself sitting front row at every session featuring Jang Jin-Sung, a North Korean defector, Loung Ung, a survivor of the Pol Pot regime, and Mukesh Kapila, who was the UN commissioner in Sudan as genocide in Darfur broke out.
Finland's world-beating education systemoffers lessons for Thailand
Life, Pimrapee Thungkasemvathana, Published on 28/10/2014
» Besides Marimekko, Nokia, Moomin, saunas and summers without darkness, Finland is also known for its excellence in education. In 1968, the northern European country went through a major educational reform. In the following decades, Finnish students consistently achieved the highest, or near highest, average results in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa).