SternWriter specialises in eclecticism, so expect the unexpected.
You may find SternWriter in factual mode, to be expected from someone who’s been a journalist for three decades, viz..
The 90s: mainly producing and reporting for ABC News Tokyo/CNBC Asia from Hong Kong and China/CNN in Beijing
The Noughties: mainly producing and directing broadcast documentaries about Europe in Japanese for NHK (Japan’s BBC) while living in a tiny English village
The 2010s: mainly scraping a living making non-broadcast docs via crowdfunding/new media/charities videos from Salisbury, Wiltshire (Stonehenge, Novichok, Cathedral).
Most of the last decade was spent as a high-functioning, but nonetheless clinically-diagnosed, depressive.
The depression could be connected to work. As a 50-something media creative watching on helpless and, increasingly peckish, as the Internet nibbles his once-ample pie into into crumbs, then oblivion, SternWriter would hardly be the first to respond with something short of ebullience.
Or it could just as well be homo sapiens’ continued cheerful, and apparently oblivious, gallop towards the abyss of Global Heating, la-la-la fingers in the ears, unperturbed by the increasingly panicked shouted warnings from Science and Experts.
Or it could be a profound chemical mystery, way beyond the ken of any individual, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, shrink, shamen or shyster. As SternWriter says, these days with less humour and more sincerity than before, ‘The short answer is ‘I don’t know’. The long answer [jaw exaggeratedly agape, head oscillating laterally like a Bollywood dancer or sassy urban teenager] ‘Iiiiiiiiii Dooooooooon’t Knooooooooow…’f
But back to the writing (you’ll find SternWriter rarely succeeds in deterring his Dickensian detours). Factual mode could range from the kind of hard news analysis and deep dives you’d expect, to more personal reminiscences as I reflect on my careers in farrier registration, textile trading, TV News, indie documentary filmmaking, and ,now, not-for-profit social media megalomaniac.
But these days, it’s just as likely to be fiction, in various forms from poems, to modern fables, cod-parables, or tall tales from a Salisbury nature trail featuring a crack willow called Fragile Sally and shaggy dog called Mr. Rolf.
Fact and Fiction should be easily distinguished, but with SternWriter there’s no escape from wordplay, prolixity as baroque as it is rococo, and punnery. If you haven’t had to look up at least one word from every newsletter or article, you win.
So let’s wander the planet, often in search of the obscure, but always with an eye on the bigger picture. There’ll be a particular focus on matters Japanese (where SternWriter lived from 1991-1995 , after spending the previous four years working for a Japanese global trading company in London, Tokyo & Osaka, and many business trips to emerging textile exporters like India, Pakistan and Indonesia). There will also be an even bigger focus on China, where in rough chronological order, SternWriter has, from his first year as a student in 1984/5, appeared ever since in an array of guises as bewitching as a bianlian artist (I did warn you); traveller, student, sinologist, salariman, translator, journalist (mainly TV but also print and radio), husband, in-law to residents of China and Taiwan, father and independent TV news feature producer/director.
You can also expect redux reviews and updates of the documentaries he made, as one-man production company Litmus Films, from 2000-2020, ranging all over the planet, from Mongolia’s sailors, to Arctic Norway’s Tamils, to Guatemalan civil society activists, and Devon veg-box revolutionaries.
If you like rants and polemics, look elsewhere - there’s plenty of it available on The Internet, we gather. As a tolerance fanatic and nuance warrior, all you’ll get from SternWriter is judicious balance, attempts to empathetically understand the positions of all parties in any dispute, controversy or conflict. This calculated zen mastery of Opinion-free Opinion Pieces is exemplified by my 4-Part series on Game Shooting. At the end of each Part, I appended a brief survey, which included weird questions about what the reader thought my opinion on the topic was.
Data collection and analysis (of which I’m also a huge fan, if its methodology is transparent and its results freely shared ) of reader response showed that 50% of readers thought I had no opinion on the subject, and the other 50% thought I agreed with them, even though they split 25%/25% on opposite sides of the controversy. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so pleased with myself, collating those results.
My actual opinion, in case you’re curious, is that Game Shooting is just one more colossal waste of valuable land, financial, human and canine resources, and that any time and energy spent engaging in any related ‘controversy’ neatly encapsulates just why homo sapiens is screwed. Or to but it less bluntly, why our species is on a madcap dash to self-destruction. Such a pity, particularly after such a strong last 10,000 years.
I should also warn you that I’ll be relentlessly pedantic and scathing about any references to ‘saving the planet’. Despite the fact the phrase is repeated so frequently, or maybe because of it, ‘saving the planet’ never fails to wind me up, even when it’s meant sincerely, and not as cynical greenwashing guffed out by PR folk hired by the 100 companies responsible for 70% of carbon emissions. Our conflation of the fate or our species and that of the planet pretty much sums up the hubris that has driven us to inadvertent suicide. (You can also expect a few sentences like that. May take a while to unpack, but, I hope, worth the wait).
The thing is, call me a big softie but I reckon human civilisation is, on balance, a Good Thing, and I’m all for preserving it. That’s why, I set up SeeThroughNews in 2021.
STN’s modest aim is to save homo sapiens from its worst traits, and do what it can to speed up our carbon drawdown. How? First, by using humour and empathy to turn inactivists into activists, both in rapidly changing individual behaviour, and in pressuring our politicians, by reminding them they’re actually meant to be our servants and not our masters, that we won’t support them unless they immediately prioritise urgent, drastic carbon reduction in everything they do.
So, our goal is to Speed Up Carbon Drawdown. It is NOT to Save the Planet, which has done perfectly well without homo sapiens for all but 300,000 of its 4.5 billion year history to date.
Rather, we seek to optimally mitigate the more catastrophic of the unintended planetary consequences set off by Thomas Newcomen in 1712, following the commercial success of his Atmospheric Engine. Now fit that on a placard.
