Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

It was the most shocking anime plot twist I've seen in more than a decade, and for a time I wondered if the hand of Joss Whedon was at work. Two weeks ago, GeGeGe no Kitaro - a children's show - killed off its most popular character, out of nowhere and at the hands of another popular character. Let's see if I can give you a summary without running on too long. Neko-musume (the name literally means "cat-daughter") is a yokai , a Japanese fairy-like creature who looks like a stylish teenage girl most of the time but turns into more of a feral cat-like creature in order to fight (or when she smells fish). She is the best friend of Inuyama Mana, a middle school girl who serves as the audience's link into the world of the yokai . As the episode two weeks ago unfolds, the Big Bad tricks Neko-musume into attacking Mana's mother, just as Mana walks in to find her mother lying on the floor bleeding out. Mana reacts the way you might expect - only the Big Ba...

I don't always do an end-of-year "Best Of" list or anything like that. In fact, some time ago I gave up calling it a "Best Of" list, because how would I really know what the best of anything is? This year, however, I've got the New York Times helping me out, by including my personal favorite anime series of the year among their Best TV Shows of 2018 . You wouldn't expect any anime to make the New York Times list (unless it had Hayao Miyazaki's name attached to it, anyway), but A Place Further Than the Universe pulled it off. This 13-episode series about four high school girls who join an expedition to Antarctica works on so many levels - characters, plotting, details, and themes. It's also one of the few shows that's ever affected the course of my real-world life. That doesn't happen often, but I'm a writer, so it does happen from time to time. In this case, when I heard about the habitat restoration project on San Nico...

Imagine a TV show with no sex, no violence, no guns or explosions, just engineers designing new things, figuring out how to make them and then landing the contracts to sell them. It would never work, right? Well, not in this country. But elsewhere...? Shitamachi Rocket returned to Japanese TV screens this season for a second run, telling the story of a little factory (about the same size as the ones I've worked for) where they build tractor engines to pay the bills, but where they also build parts for rocket engines, prosthetic heart valves, and other neat stuff. There's a bit of silly melodrama about corporate politics with their customers, but for the most part the story is driven by the quest to overcome the technical and manufacturing challenges they're presented with. Thanks to the internet, I watch far more Japanese scripted programming than American these days. Not all of it is like Shitamachi Rocket , of course, but real-world math and science turn up a...