Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

The after-school hours of underaged children in China are going through a revolution in recent days. Almost in a targeted sequence, the Chinese government killed off for-profit after-school tutoring, limited the number of hours for gaming to one per day, and if that is not enough, reemphasized that children are not supposed to go through private tutors giving lessons in private homes. For tens of millions of kids who have heretofore been occupying their hours after school with homework, cram schools, and video games, their nights have just become much freer, to a degree that probably worries their parents. 

OnlyFans was supposed to be a game-changer for the porn industry. A field long plagued by the ease with which a casual audience can find content for free, its workers have searched far and wide for ways that they can consistently monetize their (quite literally) sweat and tears on and off the screen. OnlyFans, with its ability to have content creators price different levels of access to content and a variety of other physical and virtual goods, inadvertently promised workers in the porn industry to be paid their fair share, cutting out the porn studios, distributors, and websites that all undercut what performers can truly earn.

If there is one thing that biased Western media coverage got right about the current state of Afghanistan, it is the precarity of governance in the era of post-Taliban takeover. As the Taliban streamed into the major cities of the country practically unopposed, a large number of locals have spurned the new government, fleeing to the Kabul airport in the hopes of catching an evacuation flight to a new homeland. Many of these people genuinely fear for their lives, having collaborated with the Western "occupiers" and the previous "puppet" government that the Western allies propped up at great expense. 

As Kabul falls and the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is nearly complete, there is a rather bipolar coverage of the events on the ground among Western media outlets. On one hand, there are extensive analyses of what led to the fact that an Afghan military, 300,000 men strong, that was trained and equipped with modern, US-made guns, tanks, and fighter planes, at the cost of more than USD 80 billion over two decades, simply disintegrated in the face of a two-week assault by a group of guerrilla fighters carrying nothing more than rifles and grenades. 

As the 2020 Tokyo Olympics draws to a close, major media outlets in Japan and around the world are already coming up with compilations of these Games' greatest moments. Particular to the Japanese case is a sheet abundance of crying on the part of both the athletes and commentators (many of whom are former athletes who participated in past Olympics). In media interviews, athletes shed tears of joy when they won medals, and plenty more tears of regret and disappointment when they lost close matches or just missed a medal. As commentators cried on-screen with the athletes, the media outlets hope that the audience cried with them.

If there is one keyword that describes the athletes that competed in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, it could be "diversity." Perhaps an unprecedented number of minorities among minorities found themselves on the biggest stage of their athletic career, making news not just because of their performance, but also for their very identities. The examples are numerous. From a Haitian-Japanese lighting the cauldron at the opening ceremony, to a transgender competing in women's weightlifting, to the very first ethnic Hmong competing for US Gymnastics, there are many competing, who, many just a couple of Olympics ago, that would not be present.

For some people, the legendary American gymnast Simone Biles is currently in the news for all the wrong reasons. Before the Tokyo Olympics started, the news was all about her dominance in her sport, revolutionizing the field of women's gymnastics like no one before she has ever done. Given those news articles, people rightly expected her to win gold medal after gold medal in Tokyo. Yet, instead of winning gold medals, she has recently been in the news for suddenly dropping out of the team and individual all-around competitions, citing issues with her mental health.