Kris Van der Bijl

Month: February 2024

  • A Fiction Review of The Best South African Novel

    Tintswalo is flying back to Oliver Tambo International Airport. She is the winning Rugby World Cup team’s captain. Her father is with her. He is a prominent coal mine manager turned politician. As they enter South African airspace, Tintswalo receives a text message. It gives her a quest. Unless she can solve the mystery of… →

  • The Authority to Write: A Book Review of Arthur Goldstuck’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI: A Handbook for All

    Arthur Goldstuck’s latest book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI: A Handbook for All, opens the world of this ‘new’ technology to the lay reader. It’s highly accessible to those – like me – who pretend to know about technology and what it might mean for our present and future. When artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)… →

  • Idealization in the movie Slotherhouse

    Slotherhouse is a 2023 comedy horror movie about a killer sloth who goes on a murder spree in a North American college sorority. Taking it seriously removes what makes the movie fun and unique. I think that it is a clear expression of the dangers of idealizing foreign agents to the point where humanity can no… →

  • Emily Dickinson’s “The Chariot” is an Insult to Death

    How much control does a writer have after their work is published? In an example of Emily Dickinson, an editor gave her poem “The Chariot” its title after her Death. This is not uncommon in Dickinson’s oeuvre. Most of her poems were not written for publication purposes. Many later, anthologised poems came from letters to friends and… →