Recent news of Mattel, Inc. honouring Canadian soccer star Christine Sinclair was really heart-warming.

It’s a matter of celebration to see Sinclair joining the inspiring women series of Barbie dolls, which includes Rosa Parks, a towering civil rights hero. It’s amazing to see this company recognizing non-white female figures with motivating stories. After all, we need our daughters to grow up not only as career women, but also as social justice activists.

When Barbie was initially introduced decades ago, it was more like a fashion doll catering to Eurocentric tastes and environments. This was something that people of colour like me, coming from a country with history of colonial repression, couldn’t relate to. It represented predominantly white blonde beauty that ruled the Hollywood and the modelling industry.

In the last few years, the company has really evolved by creating dolls with features of other races, such as Black, Asian, Latino and Indigenous groups of Australia and North America. In an era of decolonization, it makes perfect sense.

Then there is a growing list of inspiring women, who cannot necessarily all be white. The Barbie club rightfully includes Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and Parks, a Black American activist who refused to give up her bus seat for a white passenger for the sake of a segregation law.

Other prominent figures on the list are Eleanor Roosevelt, the U.S. first lady with a legacy of activism; Jane Goodall, a famous anthropologist and an expert on chimpanzees; prominent poet and civil-rights activist Maya Angelou; Madam C.J. Walker, a self-made entrepreneur who broke many barriers; Bessie Coleman, the first African American pilot; Ida Wells, an African American journalist; Anna Maya Wong, an Asian American actress; and astronaut Sally Ride.

Parks doll ignites interest in civil rights

Parks, who was introduced in 2019 by Mattel, was our Christmas gift for our daughter, who was an 11-year-old back then. Not only did it bring a smile on her face, she was carried away by the brief story about Parks written on the box.

Our daughter later wrote an essay about her, and Rosa Parks remains her favourite among her private doll collection. Thanks to the legacy of Parks, her interest in the civil rights movement has increased. Our daughter turned 16 this year and she now reads books about Black history with lot of curiosity. The positive impact of such initiatives on young minds was noticed firsthand by our family.

Now, I wonder if Mattel can consider including Arundhati Roy in their list. The world-renowned, award-winning Indian author has written two novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and several political essays. She has always stood for the underdog and challenged power. The God of Small Things fetched her the 1997 Booker Prize that gave her international recognition.

Roy has been under constant attack for questioning the status quo. Her difficulties have grown under the current right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP government, whose political base is highly intolerant to religious minorities and any voice of dissent.

Some scholars close to Roy have had to endure imprisonment on trumped-up charges, and yet she has remained steadfast in her resolve. One of them, physically challenged former Delhi University professor G.N. Saibaba, was thrown behind bars in 2014 by the previous government. The present BJP government not only refused to let him go, but did not allow him to see his mother when she was on her deathbed.

Standing up for jailed intellectual

Saibaba was wrongfully convicted for merely advocating for the rights of the Adivasis or the indigenous peoples of India who were facing eviction from their traditional lands by the extraction industry looking for rich minerals. After having suffered in jail for a decade, he was acquitted by a court early this year and is now a free bird.

Roy wrote a very powerful article about his incarceration in the face of possible criminal action by the vindictive Indian establishment. She was slapped with criminal complaint in the past for speaking her mind, but perhaps her international fame saved her from any action on the part of the government.

She has been in the forefront of a campaign against the Narmada River dam in Gujarat that threatened the livelihood of many. Moreover, Roy returned her national award in 2015 following the murders of scholars and the lynching of a Muslim man on suspicion of consuming beef by supporters of the Hindu Right. She was given this award in 1989 for writing a film screenplay.

In 2023, Indian authorities unsuccessfully tried to prosecute Roy for sedition in an old case. Back in 2010, she had participated in a conference on human rights abuses in Kashmir, which led to a police complaint accusing her of treason.

Roy has been vocal against ongoing repression of Kashmiri Muslims who are asking for freedom. Not only that, she previously travelled widely in the heartland of Maoist insurgents in central India to understand their side of the story and wrote a very long essay for Outlook magazine.

During the COVID 19 crisis, she reported on the plight of the poor right from the ground.

Roy doesn’t play favourites

Roy has been consistent in her criticism of power and privilege without taking sides. This is whether it concerned the previous more liberal Congress government or the present one with an ultra-nationalist agenda.

She has even been critical of Mahatma Gandhi, who was assassinated by Hindu fanatics. Roy pulled no punches while criticizing Gandhi, who is considered as father of the nation. This came over his belief in the caste system even as he challenged untouchability.

Furthermore, her first novel was also critical of the communist government in Kerala for doublespeak on caste-based oppression and discrimination against Dalits. Her second novel is a moving story of the marginalized in India.

She definitely deserves to join Maya Angelou and Ida B. Wells, considering her work in area of social justice. Barbie has already created a space for female writers and journalists; they only need to make a little room for Roy, so that the girls of my daughter’s generation can be inspired by Indian icons like her and make tyrants across the globe accountable for their misdeeds.

It’s high time that the world shed more light on people like Roy. She stands in harm’s way, raising her voice against state violence in India, whose image as the world’ s largest democracy is often taken for granted. In spite of so much intimidation, Roy has not remained silent and continues to tell the world what India really is.

Gurpreet Singh is a B.C. author and co-founder of Radical Desi. Follow him on Twitter @gurpreetonair. Follow Pancouver on Twitter @PancouverMedia and on Instagram @PancouverMedia.

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Genderswap[dot]fm is a catalog of gender-swapped song covers — think Beyoncé covering The Beatles, Miley Cyrus covering The Talking Heads, or The Flaming Lips covering Kylie Minoque. There’s also a less comprehensive Spotify playlist.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A standard QWERTY keyboard has a few dozen keys. How can Chinese—a language with tens of thousands of characters and no alphabet—be input on such a device? To answer this question, one needs to return to the beginnings of electronic Chinese technology in the wake of World War II, and follow up through to its many iterations in the present day. In particular, we need to examine the development of Chinese “input methods”—software programs that enable Chinese characters to be produced using alphanumeric symbols—and the profound impact they have had on the way Chinese is written. Today’s dominance of predictive text input, along with its unprecedented speed and ubiquity across both ideographic and alphabetic languages, owes its direct lineage to these input methods.

In case you missed it: Keanu Reeves has published a novel.

Yes, it’s true: the internet’s boyfriend has teamed up with China Miéville, one of the great speculative fiction writers of all time, to produce a novel set in the world of BRZRKR—the comic book series he also created—and we here at Literary Hub have been getting some questions about the whole thing. Questions like: “wait seriously?” and “but is it going to be any good?” and “is this really what we should be paying attention to right now?”

To those particular questions, I have answers: yes, yes, and yes.

But that still doesn’t answer the question of whether or not you should read this book—and so, in order to help decide whether you should invest your time, dollars, and imagination into The Book of Elsewhere, I’ve put together this short survey.

 

1. Are you a Keanu Reeves fan? If no… ???

2. Did you already know who China Miéville is before you clicked on this post? If yes, let’s not fool ourselves: you’ve already pre-ordered this book and I can promise you that that was a good choice.

3. Do you prefer action-Keanu or rom-com-Keanu? If the latter, I might suggest you re-watch Always Be My Maybe or even Much Ado About Nothing instead.

4. Do you like your action movies with a dose of philosophy, or would you rather it just be pedal-to-the-metal fighting? If the former, you’re going to love this book—Sigmund Freud puts in an appearance and characters frequently debate the nature of existence, the ethics and morality of warfare, Marxism, and the cost of inherited trauma, among many other heady ideas.

5. Was the pencil assault in John Wick Chapter Two metal as hell or a bit too far? If the latter, steel yourself: the novel opens with a pretty horrific act of terrorism and the main character is also an 80,000 year old immortal warrior currently working for a black ops facet of the US security complex so… he gets up to some gnarly stuff.

6. Do you need orderly storytelling, moral clarity, and clear resolutions in your narratives? There’s nothing tidy about this book by any metric—but then again, the same can be said about life.

7. If you were an immortal warrior and you discovered that the only other immortal creature on the planet was a babirusa, would you befriend it or would it be your nemesis? If this whole question makes you scratch your head, maybe move along—but if it intrigues you, do I have some good news for you!

 

On the celebrity-novel scale, The Book of Elsewhere stands well above pulpy cash-grabs like the Clintons’ co-written thrillers (to say nothing of the likes of Jake Tapper and James Comey) and it makes a better case for itself than the often-mediocre-at-best “sure why not?” novels and stories from prestige actors like Ethan Hawke and Tom Hanks. If it doesn’t rise to the “this deserves to exist on its own merits” level of something like Shopgirl… well, plenty of non-celebrity novels don’t make it there either.

Bottom line: this is a weird-ass book, far stranger than any plot synopsis or review could ever do justice. If you love Keanu’s brand of action, you’ll love this. If you love Miéville’s brand of heady speculative fiction, you’ll love this. And if you’ve never really gotten into either… well, who knows? Maybe you’ll love this too.

This article was published in my free newsletter, Ready for Rain.

On June 30th, the Summer Solstice, I set up a camera and recorded the Solstice Wall in action. Over a few hours, the camera captured a timelapse video of the shadow crossing the rays of the Solstice Wall. Here is the result:

It was gratifying to finally close the loop and show that all the thinking, designing, and creating had produced something that works. People on Instagram were excited, too. ​Watch the video (and read the comments) with music​.

As the artist, I love it, but can’t ignore the small details that could have been better. Perfection was never the goal. For the 364 non-solstice days of the year, it’s going to be an installation without a cosmic connection. In that context, I think it stands on its own and I’m proud to have it in our home.

When the summer fun is over and the rain finally returns, I plan to circle back to this idea. The Solstice Wall taught me a method for using wood strips mounted on plywood as a creative medium. The next thing will be decidedly less ambitious, but hopefully as fun and interesting to build. Stay tuned.

Find all blog posts and learn more about the project on the ​Solstice Wall page​.

By Dr. Chen Szu-Wei

When linguists mention “Standard Chinese”, they may be referring to the national language (guóyǔ), common language (pǔtōnghuà), Mandarin (huáyǔ), or even modern standard Han speech (xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ).

But how did Standard Chinese acquire its status as the official language following the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and the emergence of China as a republic? Of course, after the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, this split into the Republic of China on Taiwan and the far larger People’s Republic of China.

As legend goes, Standard Chinese was chosen through a vote. However, this was not through an election in which people chose one version among several candidates.

The origins of Standard Chinese actually go back to Imperial China. In 1902, the dean of academic affairs of Imperial University (Jīngshī dà xuétáng zǒng jiàoxí), Wu Rulun, ventured on a mission to Japan to investigate its educational system. He was amazed at how the adoption of a national Japanese language as the medium of instruction in schools had contributed to the spread of education. Upon returning to China, Wu advocated for the use of a national language.

This idea caught on, even though China had hundreds of languages and dialects. In 1909, the Qing government formally proclaimed “official speech” (guānhuà) as the “national language” and, in 1911, promulgated the National Language Unification Act. This was the first time that the term “national language” appeared in law.

It’s worth noting that the term “official speech” denoted the common spoken language of the literati and officialdom. The phonological basis is rooted mainly in Beijing Mandarin from the Qing dynasty.

The concept of a “national language”—promoted for general use throughout the country—was borrowed from Japan. Moreover, the term itself was derived from Japanese, similar to many other “Japanese-made Chinese words” in use since the mid-19th century. They included economy (jīngjì), telephone (diànhuà), and element (yuánsù).

Vote held on Chinese characters

Soon after the Republic of China was founded in 1912, officials convened the Conference for the Unification of Pronunciation (Dúyīn tǒngyī húi) in Beijing. In 1913, it brought together linguistic experts and representatives from all the provinces.

Here, delegates decided on the national standard pronunciation of each of approximately 6,500 Chinese characters by a majority vote. This necessitated reaching a compromise between Beijing Mandarin and other dialects from southern provinces. For the first time in history, the pronunciation of Chinese characters was determined at an official conference.

Six years later, the Ministry of Education established the Preparatory Commission for National Language Unification (Guóyǔ tǒngyī chóubèi huì). The following year in 1920, the ministry published the Dictionary of National Pronunciation (Guóyīn zìdiǎn).

However, this pieced-together compromise proved to be impractical because of its uneven quality. As a result, officials proposed that rather than proceeding with an artificial synthesis, the country should simply adopt the phonology of Beijing Mandarin. Therefore, in 1923 a committee was formed to review the pronunciation determined in the 1913 conference.

In the end, the committee settled upon Beijing Mandarin as a viable alternative. It became the phonological basis for national pronunciation. To promote this new standard, the committee drafted a Revised Dictionary of National Pronunciation.

That’s not the end of the story. In 1932, the Vocabulary of National Pronunciation for Everyday Use (Guóyīn Chángyòng Zìhuì) was published, replacing the old Dictionary of National Pronunciation. The previous standard—established in 1913 for the phonology of standard Chinese—was henceforth referred to as “old national pronunciation” (lǎo guóyīn), while the revised standard became known as “new national pronunciation” (xin guóyīn).

Whether you speak guóyǔ, pǔtōnghuà, or huáyǔ, now you know how the national standard was established. However, despite Standard Chinese being the norm for almost a century since its official recognition, ongoing changes persist—in particular after the split of China following the civil war.

As a result, multiple standards, along with some regional variation in vocabulary and pronunciation, exist across different Chinese-speaking communities.

Chen Szu-Wei is former Assistant Professor of the Graduate Institute of Musicology and Director of NTU Center for the Arts at the National Taiwan University. He currently works as an independent curator and scholar.

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