This past Monday (August 11), the president of the United States held a press conference flanked by Pete Hegseth, the current US Secretary of Defense and former weekend anchor at Fox TV; United States Attorney General Pam Bondi, frequent guest on Fox, conservative lobbyist and registered foreign agent and lobbyist for Qatar; Kash Patel, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation frequent Fox contributor and conservative podcaster. Described by NPR as a “fixture on right-wing talk shows and podcasts”; Jeanine Pirro, United States attorney for the District of Columbia, Fox TV host, lawyer, and author, after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, Pirro defended Trump, stating “I have been involved in a million situations with him and his children. He has always been a gentleman.”

It has become commonplace to see Mr. Trump at pressers surrounded by his handpicked devotees, yet there was something especially disturbing about this line up. Not just their collective affiliations with right-wing media, it was also their extraordinary sub-par pedigrees. 

Is truth stranger than fiction? Imagine for a moment that  the scene of Trump and his cohorts paraded behind the podium were the creation of a gifted fiction author. Could a truly competent writer be able to craft a story with this cast of characters and situation into a believable story? This is the question we present to acclaimed author of fiction, Mark Haskell Smith. His works includes seven novels with one-word titles including Moist, Salty, and Blown. Smith modestly describes himself as a humorist. 

Louisa Lim – Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

“Cantonese is a very sweary language”, announces Louisa Lim. The award-winning journalist is explaining the joy of using so many expletives when speaking about the place she grew up in. Ms. Lim has masterfully captured so much of the essence of what the British called a “barren rock” with personal accounts and observations of the place she loves, Hong Kong. For decades, Hong Kong’s history was simply not taught, especially to Hong Kongers, obscuring its origins as a place of refuge and rebellion. When protests erupted in 2019 and were met with escalating suppression from Beijing, Louisa Lim—raised in Hong Kong as a half-Chinese, half-English child, and now a reporter who has covered the region for nearly two decades—realized that she was uniquely positioned to unearth the city’s untold stories. Lim’s deeply researched and personal account casts startling new light on key moments: the British takeover in 1842, the negotiations over the 1997 return to China, and the future Beijing seeks to impose. Indelible City features guerrilla calligraphers, amateur historians and archaeologists, and others who, like Lim, aim to put Hong Kongers at the center of their own story. Wending through it all is the King of Kowloon, whose iconic street art both embodied and inspired the identity of Hong Kong—a site of disappearance and reappearance, power and powerlessness, loss and reclamation. Louisa Lim is a charming and fascinating guest.

The portrait of Mark Haskell Smith by Martin Rusch

The opinions expressed in this program are of the guests and host and not necessarily those of the broadcast outlets of Life Elsewhere