Three seismic events have occurred in one go in Northern Ireland. One, for the first time in Northern Ireland’s 100-year existence, an Irish nationalist party placed first in an election—and not just any nationalist party, but Sinn Fein, the longtime political wing of the Irish Republican Army.

The more I’ve gotten to know her, the more I’ve come to think that Wang Tzu-Hsuan exemplifies some of the best qualities of the younger Taiwanese I’ve met here in Taipei: open-minded, serious but not too serious, spontaneous, and thoughtful. At 33, she is unlike most surgeons in Taiwan—who are typically older, and male—and while many of her medical-school classmates sought more lucrative careers in the United States, she opted to stay, out of a sense of duty.

Three seismic events have occurred in one go in Northern Ireland. One, for the first time in Northern Ireland’s 100-year existence, an Irish nationalist party placed first in an election—and not just any nationalist party, but Sinn Fein, the longtime political wing of the Irish Republican Army.

The more I’ve gotten to know her, the more I’ve come to think that Wang Tzu-Hsuan exemplifies some of the best qualities of the younger Taiwanese I’ve met here in Taipei: open-minded, serious but not too serious, spontaneous, and thoughtful. At 33, she is unlike most surgeons in Taiwan—who are typically older, and male—and while many of her medical-school classmates sought more lucrative careers in the United States, she opted to stay, out of a sense of duty.

In the foreword to her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, the historian Barbara W. Tuchman offered a warning to people with simplistic ideas about what life was like in the medieval world, and what that might say about humanity as a whole: You think you know, but you have no idea.The period, which spans roughly 500 to 1500, presents some problems for people trying to craft uncomplicated stories.

A cancer diagnosis is a shocking blow for anyone. But you might imagine that someone like Timothy Keller, a Presbyterian minister who has spent years talking with people about mortality, would be well prepared to deal with that kind of news. Keller has sat at people’s bedsides as they died, and he’s written a book called On Death. Perhaps most crucially, he believes in God and an afterlife. And yet, when Keller received a diagnosis of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, he was terrified.

In the late 1990s, learning about something obscure took effort. You’d have to make your way to the right bookstore or know the edgy older person who might turn you on to a special record, a book, or a zine. These pre-internet objects were community builders; if you met someone who had heard of the specific thing you were into, you made a very cool friend. That was Bitch magazine.