Shortly after Jarrett Wrisley arrived in Bangkok in 2008, the global financial crisis hit the media industry, forcing outlets to slash budgets. Wrisley, a food and travel journalist, saw his opportunities to write rapidly diminishing, so he pivoted to the only other thing he knew how to do: cooking. In September 2010, Wrisley opened Soul Food Mahanakorn, serving northern and northeastern Thai fare in the capital’s trendy Thonglor neighborhood.

Since 2005, Amazon has changed how virtually every American shops. That February, the company launched Prime, the first-of-its-kind, lightning-fast subscription delivery service that now has an estimated 147 million members in the United States. Along the way, Amazon invented its own shopping holiday, assembled an army of couriers schlepping your packages in the trunks of their cars, and turned toilet paper into the kind of thing that people have sent to their homes by the case.

Perhaps, like me, you inwardly sigh with the breath of a thousand winds whenever you hear the words cancel culture, as mangled and distorted as the expression has become. If so, know that the people behind Netflix’s The Chair are likely sighing too.

Few observers of global discourse range as widely as Elnathan John, the novelist, satirist, and lawyer who frequently participates online and off in conversations about art, politics, and culture pertaining to at least three continents. His novel, Born on a Tuesday, is a coming-of-age story set in his native Nigeria. In Becoming Nigerian: A Guide, he tried his hand at satire.

Every once in a while, after a commercial break on Jeopardy, Alex Trebek would make an announcement: The judges, he’d say, had done more research. Having consulted an atlas, an encyclopedia, or Google, they’d realized that their initial assessment of a contestant’s answer had been wrong. They would now make things right. In an instant, the dollar-based score on the affected contestant’s podium would change. And then the show, its error thus corrected, would go on.