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In May 2014, a U.S. Special Operations team in a Black Hawk helicopter landed in the hills of Afghanistan. Waiting for them were more than a dozen Taliban fighters and a tall American, who looked pale and out of sorts: Bowe Bergdahl. Bergdahl, a U.S. soldier, had been a prisoner of the Taliban for nearly five years, and now he was going home.

President Obama announced Bergdahl’s return in the Rose Garden, with the soldier’s parents at his side. Bergdahl’s hometown of Hailey, Idaho, planned a big celebration to welcome him back. But then, within days—within hours of his rescue, in fact—public reaction to his return flipped. People started saying Bergdahl shouldn’t be celebrated. Some of the soldiers from his unit called him a deserter, a traitor. They said he had deliberately walked off their small outpost in eastern Afghanistan and into hostile territory.

Hailey canceled its celebration. The army launched an investigation. Finally, in March, the military charged Bergdahl with two crimes, one of which carries the possibility of a life sentence. Through all of this, Bergdahl has been quiet. He hasn’t spoken to the press or done any interviews on TV. He’s been like a ghost at the center of a raucous fight.

Now, in Season Two, we get to hear what he has to say.

For this season, Sarah Koenig teams up with filmmaker Mark Boal and Page 1 to find out why one idiosyncratic guy decided to walk away, into Afghanistan, and how the consequences of that decision have spun out wider and wider. It’s a story that has played out in unexpected ways from the start. And it’s a story that’s still going on.

Get Serial.

Doctors and aswang are the two things most often associated with Filipinos on prime-time American TV. In the ’80s hospital drama St. Elsewhere, doctors were boggled by a weird sickness called “ba-ngyoo-ngyot”; more recently a doctor in House was supposed to be Filipino-Korean. “Ass-wang” have turned up on CSI, Grimm, and recently on The Strain, where they were described in a book. But another category has sprung up since Tina Fey started fantasizing about one on 30 Rock: the Filipino boyfriend. There’s the computer nerd on How to Get Away With Murder, and now there’s the raison d’etre for a new CW series: a Fil-American guy so desirable that the titular character leaves everything she’s ever worked for in New York to follow him to West Covina, CA.

Read our TV column The Binge at BusinessWorld.

But we already knew that, when she screamed at the drugstore clerk in Magnolia with her mouth in a perfect rectangle shape.

Here she cries on command and delivers her monologues for a buck. Walang buwelo! The shocking part: People don’t know who she is. Hey Elmo, take a hard look at a real redhead!

From Vanity Fair. Thanks to Ricky for the alert.

Available in hardcover at National Bookstores, Php1049

We were not expecting a new David Mitchell novel so soon after The Bone Clocks, so when our friend pointed to the good-looking volume with the cut-out cover, we almost did not associate it with one of our favourite authors. Yesterday we made the same mistake we always make with Mitchell’s books: we picked it up for a quick nosh, and when we looked up from the last page, three hours had passed. His fiction has time-dilating properties, which are especially appropriate to a short novel about Atemporals.

Yes, Atemporals, the antagonists of The Bone Clocks, who eat souls in order to prolong their lives. It’s a great haunted house yarn with interlocking plots involving many characters in different time periods—like Cloud Atlas—and the latest incarnation of a certain individual who turned up in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Bone Clocks. Bone clocks are human beings—bags of blood subject to the depredations of Time. Critics are bitching about whether this is literature at all, or complaining that the author has lost his way and gotten sucked up into the genre black hole. Screw that. This is a book for people who insist that reading should be fun.

If you have not read Mitchell’s other novels, will you enjoy this? Yes. It’s a fast and spirited introduction to his work, and we envy you the thrill of reading Mitchell for the first time.

Denmark has produced some of the most important filmmakers in the history of cinema, from Carl Theodor Dreyer to the instigators of Dogme 95 and after. Starting tomorrow you can see the work of recent Danish filmmakers at the Danish Film Festival in Shang Mall.

If you have not seen The Hunt, we recommend you start there. Mads Mikkelsen (TV’s Hannibal) plays a kindergarten employee who is accused of sexually abusing a child. The charge goes viral in the small town, and even after he is cleared of the charge, he has to defend himself against the same friends he used to go hunting with. Mikkelsen won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his amazing, empathic portrayal. Also, the movie is set during the Xmas season, which makes for great counter programming.

Then you can watch Mikkelsen again in A Royal Affair, a costume drama where he is cast as friend and physician to the unstable King Christian VII. The physician and Queen Caroline Mathilda use their influence over the king to make Denmark a centre of enlightened thought, enraging the aristocracy. Alicia Vikander, who is in every other movie this year, plays the queen.

Your choice for President is Jejomar Binay.

You think that the administration of President Benigno Aquino III has been a flop. You have become more discontented with your lot in life since 2010. You see that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and every day the gap grows wider. You want a chief executive who is close to the masses. Gestures like attending your relative’s wake really mean something to you. Allegations of corruption do not bother you. Observing Philippine politics has turned you into a cynic: you have concluded that everyone steals anyway, so you might as well support someone who gives something to the poor, be it free movies or a birthday cake. What did those political elites ever do for you? When people make fun of the candidate’s height or appearance, they mock you as well.

Your choice for President is Rodrigo Duterte.

You believe that the biggest problems of the Philippines are lawlessness and a lack of discipline. You’ve reached the conclusion that left to their own devices the Filipinos will descend into anarchy and chaos, and that the only way to stop this is to elect a leader who will rule with an iron fist. Perhaps you are nostalgic for the Marcos regime, or being too young to remember it, harbor grand illusions about the “New Society”. In any case you believe that criminals do not deserve due process, and should be punished immediately. Human rights violations do not bother you because you think that your own human rights are already being violated by law-breakers. Not only are you pro-death penalty, you want an instant death penalty for criminals. In the event that the executed turn out to be innocent, they are acceptable collateral damage. You want a leader who will scare the people into obeying the rules.

Read our column at InterAksyon.com.