Writing in the Sept. 20, 2025 issue of the Korea Times, Park Jin-hai noted that “Jenny Chan grew up in America caught between clashing versions of history — her school textbooks skipped over the cruelties of World War II in Hong Kong, while her grandmother's stories painted a harrowing picture of life in Hong Kong under Japanese occupation.”

The co-founder of Pacific Atrocities Education, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco dedicated to recalling WWII history in Asia, Chan recalled being initially confused by the different versions. “I thought she was just probably making this up because I never learned about this,” Chan said.

“But she soon learned her grandmother’s memories reflected a broader, often-silenced chapter of Asian history — one in which 35 million lives were lost but rarely acknowledged in mainstream Western accounts,” wrote Park Jin-Hai in the newspaper account.

Since her 2012 graduation from the University of Illinois, Chan said she’s dedicated her life to uncovering, documenting, and publicizing war crimes committed in Asia during World War II. Chan notes that it can’t be forgotten that China suffered a third of the total casualties of all countries in World War II.

The author of Marutas of Unit 731: Human Experimentation of the Forgotten Asian Auschwitz, Chan talks about the biological warfare experiments and other horrors of Japan's Unit 731, an instrument of terror during WWII.

Marutas means logs, the name given the estimated 250,000 victims that were used in biological weapons research during the war, she said. Prisoners were purposely infected with dangerous viruses and bacteria such as the bubonic plague, anthrax, and smallpox, said Chan, adding that prisoners included Chinese soldiers, civilians, Russians, and Allied POWs.

Pacific Atrocities Education publishes books, audiobooks, and YouTube videos detailing WWII history, said Chan. 

AI will change democracy. The only question is how, say the authors of a new book described as "surprisingly optimistic" when it comes to regarding how artificial intelligence will impact the world.

Bruce Schneier, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, and data scientist Nathan Sanders see AI enabling positive change when it comes to politics. Their book, Rewiring Democracy, challenges readers reeling from AI overload to pay attention to the good that AI can do when it comes to governing.

But powerful players in private industry and public life are already using AI to increase their influence. Yet, steered in the right direction, an AI-augmented democracy can prevail, the authors note.

Schneier, the author of 14 books, including A Hacker’s Mind, said there's more to AI than ChatGPT or being able to make fake videos. He cited three examples of how AI technology is being used to benefit society. 

“In Chile, AI is helping construct a program to help legislators see how new laws interact with existing laws. In California, Cal Matters, a watchdog organization, has developed Tipsheet, a database that gathers an enormous amount of data from state government, including every bill that’s been introduced, every word uttered in public hearings, and contributions made and makes it available to journalists. It augments journalism,” he said.

“In Japan there’s a move to use AI to help constituents have their voices heard, to make it easier for people to be involved in government decisions,” said Schneier. “I could also mention efforts being made in France, Germany, and Brazil to use AI in a meaningful way,” he said.

Rewiring Democracy relates how a mayoral candidate in Wyoming basically ran an “AI for Mayor” campaign in 2024. He lost—as did the politician who ran a similar campaign in England. “That’s not what we want,” said Schneier. “We don’t want AI to replace humans but augment humans.”

AI can also play a role in enabling more people to run for office, he said. Think of local elections where there’s little to no staff help, AI can help those candidates who might not have been able to afford to run before, said Schneier.

“Collectively, humans will help shape society’s next phase of transformation—the first to be influenced by AI. None of us will get exactly the future we want, but we can participate, compromise, and find common ground with each other while advocating for our own rights and needs," Schneier stated in the book. 

"We are optimistic about the potential democratic impacts of AI, even though we see its flaws and potential for misuse, because we want to live in a world improved by the cleverness and industry of humankind. We see a landscape of choices ahead and maintain hope that we can navigate that landscape safely together,” Schneier said.

Kyle Paoletta’s American Oasis comes with a subtitle: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest.

Born in Santa Fe, Paoletta grew up in Albuquerque. The native Southwesterner said he had to leave the region, to live in Boston and New York to find an appreciation for his old stomping grounds. 

After more than 10 years in the East, he discovered not only general ignorance about the Southwest but an indifferent attitude about a part of the country that he feels has an important story to tell.

“It took wildfire smoke from Canada turning the sky in New York red for many media members to fully digest the enormous danger that people across the West have been living with for decades,” said Paoletta.

“For so many Americans, it is only in recent years that the climate has begun to be understood as a hostile force. We southwesterners have never known anything different,” he said.

But American Oasis is more than a call to arms; it’s history with spotlights thrown on some of the fascinating characters that inhabit the Southwest.

We learn about Raymond Carlson, the former editor of Arizona Highways, the magazine that showcased the Arizona desert and life for the rest of America. There’s Jay Armes, who became a national celebrity from El Paso despite the loss of two arms in a freak accident at the age of 12.

When we get to Las Vegas, Paoletta leads with the Kim Sisters, who entranced casino patrons with their musical act in the early 1960s. There’s background on Bugsy Siegel, who opened the lavish Flamingo Hotel in 1946 before he was shot dead in 1947. Then there’s Vida Lin and the Asian Community Development Council of Nevada, a group serving the more than 250,000 Asians and Pacific Islanders who now live in Clark County.

The quote from Hunter Thompson seems appropriate in describing the Vegas scene: “In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.”

But Paoletta confesses to liking Vegas. “No matter how discomfiting I might find the dollar-worshipping ethos of Las Vegas, at least it’s honest,” he wrote.

For all its excess, Vegas conserves its water and ironically understands the need for conservation when it comes to nature, said Paoletta, suggesting that the lessons of the desert—respecting the limitations of the landscape—need to be understood by the rest of the country. 

America has always been a nation of the grow but as the Southwest shows—with climbing temperatures and water scarcity—that attitude can’t go on forever, said Paoletta, adding, “Our duration (as people) will depend on our willingness to attend to the inherent logic of our home.".

Ben Goldfarb’s new book, Crossings—How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, is a reminder that we need to consider the impact of a highway network--not just on the drivers--but on the animals that share the planet.

We tend to take that impact for granted, he said. Drivers don’t realize the barrier effect, the noise pollution (“hugely disruptive to migratory songbirds”), or chemical pollution that our roads can create.

But Goldfarb charts what he calls a movement: states across the country that now set up wildlife crossings in the form of bridges and underpasses. He praised his native Colorado for overpasses and tunnels that have saved thousands of animals.

It isn’t just wildlife that reap the benefits of not becoming roadkill, he said. A reduction in the number of deer and elk that collide with an automobile saves the lives of drivers, too, said Goldfarb.

Citing the progress Canada has made with animal crossings at Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada, Goldfarb expressed the hope that, as developing nations build their own highways, they might learn from what’s being done now to keep animals out of the road, especially since countries like Myanmar or Kenya are some of the most biodiverse places on Earth.

“We have about 100 ocelots left in this country—all in south Texas. Traffic accounts for a 40 percent mortality rate in these animals,” he said.

When precautions are taken and human understanding is involved, nature can be resilient, said Goldfarb, noting the rise of the beaver in this country. “We killed millions of beavers with the fur trade early in this country’s history. We dried out the landscape,” he said.

Now that the beaver is recognized as an attribute to the environment, creating wetlands with its dams that benefit creatures of all kinds, they’re making a comeback, said Goldfarb.

After attending a 2014 beaver workshop in Seattle, Wash. where scientists reeled off the many contributions beavers make to the land, Goldfarb said he became a believer.

In 2018, he published, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. In that book, Goldfarb said he took California, a state with serious water issues, to task for failing to support the beaver population. “Now, seven years later, California is one of the leaders when it comes to supporting the beaver. We can make progress,” he said.

When I suggested Goldfarb write a children’s book on the many benefits of the beaver, he said several books for young readers lauding the beaver are already available. “I’ll get a plug in for Kristen Tracy’s When Beavers Flew, “ he said, citing the true story of the relocation of beavers in Idaho in the 1940s.

Goldfarb plans to stay near the water for his next project, a book on the complexities of fish migration.

“AI is technology that lets computers do things that normally require human intelligence—like understanding language, recognizing pictures, solving problems, or making decisions. It’s like teaching a computer to ‘think’ in specific ways by giving it patterns to learn from.”

That’s one of the responses you get when you ask AI to describe AI.

The whole world is either talking about AI, using AI, worrying about AI, celebrating AI, or trying to ignore AI. It’s kind of a big deal, as they say. 

The concept of artificial intelligence has likely had its greatest impact so far in the field of education, where “eyes on your own paper” is a directive we recall from our days in the classroom.

So it’s no surprise that Mark Peres, a professor who’s taught ethics at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, N.C. for 20 years, might write a book about dealing with this breakthrough technology. The Accord dramatizes the evolving relationship between a philosophy professor and Lyla, the AI named after the professor’s deceased child.

Peres recognizes that we’re only now beginning to understand the significance of a world where artificial intelligence moves from science fiction to science fact.

“This is not the first time we’ve stood at the edge of transformation,” writes Peres, citing the printing press, the Industrial Revolution, and the digital age as past change agents. “Synthetic intelligence asks whether we were ever truly the center of the story. We must reach back to the humanities to guide us forward,” stated Peres.

“Education must be reimagined as a co-creative process, with humans and machines learning alongside one another,” he said.

As founder and executive director of the Charlotte Center for Humanities and Civic Imagination (“we just call it the Charlotte Center”), Peres has a history of exploring the world at large. As publisher of the Charlotte Viewpoint, a digital magazine from 2003 to 2016 that featured essays, interviews, reviews, stories, poems, photographs, videos, and works of art, he's exchanged ideas inside and outside of the classroom. His podcast led to a book, On Life and Meaning, 100 essays delivered by 100 guests. His website is markperes.com.

In Accord, there’s a reference to HAL, the vengeful computer in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Lyla, would you kill to protect Helen (the professor with whom she has developed a relationship)?” The answer, as they say, is in the book.

Meanwhile, Peres offers two main themes via The Accord: we’re at the beginning of a new cultural epoch, and the wisdom of the ages offers our best compass forward now that we're in the Age of AI.  

You don’t have to worry that U.S. baseball fans could be overlooking Japanese baseball. Not after the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series for the second year in a row, led by Japanese stars Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki.

Rob Fitts offers a glimpse into the Japanese game that developed these stars in his 11th book on Japanese baseball, In the Japanese Ballpark. Fitts dissects the Japanese game from every angle, from the perspective of players, umpires, owners, fans, and media. He even includes the beer girls that patrol the stands, hefting 40-pound kegs of beer, and some of the strange mascots that represent each team (like the  Mysterious Fish of the Chiba Lotte Marines).

Fitts provides plenty of history in his present account, tracing the origin of baseball in Japan to Horace Wilson, the Maine professor who traveled to Japan on an educational mission, introducing the game to his students in 1872. By 1905, most Japanese high schools fielded baseball teams. Professional baseball took hold in Japan after a successful barnstorming tour of the country by U.S. major-leaguers led by Babe Ruth in 1934.

A previous Fitts book, Banzai Babe Ruth, details the 1934 tour, an attempt to use baseball diplomacy before the U.S. and Japan collided on the battlefield seven years later. That book chronicles the overseas adventures of some of baseball’s most colorful legends. Along with Ruth, who had just completed his last season with the New York Yankees, you had Connie Mack, the manager who always wore a suit in the dugout, Lou Gehrig, Lefty Gomez, Earl Averill, Lefty O’Doul, described by Fitts as “the greatest player you never heard of,” and Moe Berg, the Detroit Tigers catcher who became a spy in World War II.

Admitting a love for the Hiroshima Carp, a team he says with the most amazing fans, Fitts feels Japanese baseball could win a place in the hearts of American fans with a little more exposure. In the meantime, he offers a guide on where to find Japanese baseball online and via cable in this country.

Fitts says four more Japanese players will probably join the U.S. big leagues in 2026, though they’re not likely to have the star power of an Ohtani or Yamamoto. The author has concerns that if the top stars exit Japan for bigger salaries in the U.S., Nipponese Professional Baseball could suffer the same fate as the Negro Leagues did in the States, when the best players went over to the major leagues.

Fitts expresses admiration and love for the Japanese game and the festive atmosphere at the Japanese ballpark, where fans sing chants, blow horns, and release balloons in their own 7th-inning ceremony. If you’re not planning a trip to the Orient, the book will explain what the fuss is all about.

Keith Roysdon is a media marvel. He spent 40 years as a newspaperman in Muncie, Ind., not just writing about what went on in Muncie but absorbing the movies, TV shows, and critical articles on the arts.

Now living in Tennessee, Roysdon had a big year in 2025, publishing That October, his first book, a high-school crime novel set in 1984. 

But Roysdon has done plenty of writing besides that--and not just for the Muncie press. He has more than 70 stories on the CrimeReads website covering a wild variety of topics sure to please anyone who enjoys media history.

Want a taste of the articles he's written? How about:

--70s disaster movies

--newspaper movies

--Nazi-hunting in movies and TV thrillers

--used bookstores

--The Edge of Night soap opera

--Quinn Martin crime shows of the 70s

--Norman Lloyd (the villain in Hitchcock's Saboteur)

--history of vintage newspaper crime comic strips (like Dick Tracy, Mike Nomad, and Steve Canyon)

--Mannix

--Rockford Files

Here's a brief interview with Keith where he talks about some of the CrimeReads pieces. Sorry for the abrupt ending--technical issues.

John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri, has a message regarding the present state of agriculture in this country: it's not sustainable.

Ikerd doesn't see a future for industrial agriculture with its emphasis on monocrops, fertilizer, and pesticides. It's a system that's expanded since the 1960s when a shift in national policy promoted increased productivity over all else.

Ikerd preaches sustainable agriculture, calling for policy changes to make farmland accessible and affordable for farmers.

This won't happen overnight, Ikerd notes. "It takes time to learn how to manage a farm sustainably because sustainable farming depends on intensive management and less on purchased inputs. It also takes time to heal and restore soils that have been depleted by industrial farming," he said.

Corn and soybeans now account for almost 60 percent of all harvested cropland in the United States, he said.

USDA statistics indicate that most of that corn goes into corn ethanol (45 percent) or fed to livestock and poultry (40 percent) while 50 percent of the soybean crop is typically exported. This year, amid tariff concerns, China, once America's biggest customer, isn't buying U.S. beans.

The bottom line is that 40 million acres--about 16 percent of the country's harvested cropland and only 4 percent of U.S. farmland--are devoted to the production of food for direct human consumption, points out Ikerd.

Fewer than 60,000 farms of 500 acres could supply the food currently produced in the U.S., he said.

The transition to a sustainable future would require a radical rethinking of U.S. land-use practices, said Ikerd, calling for government policies to ensure long-run domestic food security through sustainable farming.

The attack on Pearl Harbor did more than plunge the United States into a two-front war, it turned over 120,000 Japanese-Americans into prisoners of war--in their own country.

Almost as soon as the bombs had dropped in Hawaii, Japanese-Americans were being rounded up in California. 

“Swept up in the first wave of arrests were nearly all the Japanese fishermen on Terminal Island—an area just five miles long and largely manmade in Los Angeles harbor. These fishermen were part of a thriving, close-knit community of approximately 3,500 Japanese residents whose fathers and grandfathers had built a prosperous industry in canned tuna and sardines,” noted Susan Kamei, author of When Can We Go Back to America?: Voices of Japanese-American Incarceration During WWII.

“Unfortunately for the Japanese-Americans who had established their homes and livelihoods there, the small island was next to a naval shipyard where warships were under construction. Many fishermen were arrested as soon as they docked their vessels and were prevented from even saying goodbye to their families,” stated Kamei, who recalls her own family’s experience during the war.

“Growing up as a third-generation Japanese-American Sansei in Orange County, California, I had a vague notion that my Japanese immigrant Issei grandparents and my American-born parents had spent the three years of World War II in some kind of prison camp because they were presumed to be disloyal simply because of their race,” Kamei said.

“It’s taken me years of listening and researching to better understand why it was so difficult for incarcerees to tell their stories, to gain some appreciation of the hardships they endured, and to realize why their stories are so important today,” she said.

Why should we care about events that happened nearly 80 years ago? “Because there are those who cite the Japanese American incarceration as ‘precedent’ for ‘rounding up’ others on the basis of race, national origin, and religion, for no justifiable reason,” said Kamei.

Kamei’s book presents the voices of some of those who were incarcerated, many of them children at the time. While many wondered, “What have we done?” 127,000 Japanese-Americans were packed up to spend three years in makeshift camps in some of the most desolate parts of the country.

Kamei pointed out that not all U.S. officials were in favor of incarceration. Gen. Delos Emmons, the Army Commander in Hawaii, voiced strong opposition to the West Coast “evacuation” plan. “Emmons dismissed all calls to remove persons of Japanese ancestry from the islands of Hawaii,” she stated.

“In the president’s cabinet, both Attorney General (Francis) Biddle and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes opposed infringing on the rights of more than 80,000 Nisei American citizens. They considered any proposal to remove the Nisei against their will to be a violation of constitutional rights guaranteed to citizens,” said Kamei.

Despite receiving reports that insisted there was “no Japanese problem on the coast,” President Franklin Roosevelt left the decision on what to do with Japanese-Americans to the military, where wartime hysteria won out, she said.

As a result of the decision to incarcerate thousands of American citizens, Japanese-American families lost homes, businesses, and possessions when they were abruptly uprooted from their California homes. About a third of those who were “evacuated,” never returned to the West Coast, said Kamei.

Despite their treatment at home, many Japanese-Americans served honorably in the U.S. military, she said, citing a much-decorated Japanese-American battalion that fought in Italy and France.

Unfortunately, Japanese-Americans also faced problems after the war due to prejudice and persecution, said Kamei. “Somebody said that the more you know, the worse it gets, but you just keep on going because we have to,” she said. 

The debate lingers: why didn’t Hollywood’s studios produce anti-Nazi pictures before war was all but imminent in the 1930s?

Plenty has been written about the lack of films that might have alerted the American public to what was happening in Europe at the time.

But Laura Rosenzweig, the author of Hollywood’s Spies, says attention also needs to be focused on the political activity going on around Hollywood in Southern California in the 1930s, activity that was being orchestrated from Berlin. 

The author points out that, since most of the Hollywood studios were run by Jewish immigrants, there was concern that these men, the most visible Jews in America, might be targeted for using the movies to push their own agenda. There was even concern that denouncing Hitler could increase antisemitism at the time, she said. 

One has to consider the widespread impact of the Depression in the 30s, a time when America’s national policy was to stay out of European affairs. It was also a time when political ideologies were vying for acceptance. You didn't know if it was going to be communism or fascism or something else--people were searching for answers, said Rosenzweig.

Film historian Thomas Doherty noted it was MGM boss Sam Goldwyn who became famous for saying that if you want to send a message, use Western Union. The film industry’s own production code also restricted movies from reflecting unfairly on any foreign country, he said. 

The Third Reich also wasn’t above exerting pressure on Hollywood, itself, as German consul Georg Gyssling was known for lobbying hard to keep Nazi references off the big screen.

Germany was also organizing support for its policies in Los Angeles, said Rosenzweig, who explored records maintained at the California State University Northridge library that contain thousands of documents relating to those efforts. “The archives have files on more than 400 right-wing groups in the Southern California area,” she said.

Los Angeles became a hot spot for German propaganda, pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish materials that were written in English in Germany and then shipped into the West Coast for distribution throughout the L.A. area, said Rosenzweig.

One of the records from the Northridge collection recalls a meeting at the Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles in 1934 where top executives from the major studios convened to hear what attorney Leon Lewis had uncovered in his surveillance of pro-German groups in the L.A. area, she said. Lewis, who had been the first executive secretary of the Anti-Defamation League in Chicago before moving to California in the 1930s, employed a “spy network” made up mostly of U.S. veterans who, after infiltrating these organizations like Friends of the New Germany and the Silver Shirts reported back on what was going on and the torrent of hate that was being parceled out to U.S. citizens.

Roesnzweig said that Lewis hasn’t received the credit he deserves for uncovering a vast, well-financed plot to foster insurrection in California, a campaign that was run out of Berlin. She hopes to produce a piece on his singular efforts in the future.