Sales of the Japanese graphic novels and comic books known as manga have been falling inside Japan itself since the mid 1990s—a fact that Carl Horn ’91, manga editor for Dark Horse Comics, attributes to the long decline in the nation’s population—especially at the young end of the spectrum. “Even though Japan has the deserved reputation as a country where adults read comics, the top-selling titles are your Dragon Balls, your Narutos, your One Pieces, your Attack on Titans,” Horn says. “In other words, manga that were made for younger readers.”

That means the future of the manga industry is increasingly outside Japan, Horn says. And for American readers, that offers both pluses and minuses.

On the plus side, manga creators are starting to become more accessible to their foreign readers—appearing slightly more often at conventions and responding on social media. On the minus side, however, Horn worries that their stories may lose some of their Japanese flavor.

“The fans don’t necessarily want to see manga becoming ‘more American,’ whatever that means,” he says, adding that for most manga readers, the cultural differences are an important part of the attraction. “However, what they would like to see, I think, are more personal connections with the creators—that is, Japanese creators getting more involved with their English-language readership.”

One thing he doesn’t think will change is the special attraction manga holds for people who feel like outsiders. “Manga is a medium where people who wouldn’t be cast as heroes in traditional American stories, can be,” he says. “You don’t necessarily have to look the part. People considered oddballs, you know, people who dress weird, people with weird hair—in manga they can still be the heroes of an action epic.”

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She’s smart. She’s funny. She’s a 20-something-year-old Saudi woman growing up on the Moon. That’s Jazz Bashara, the protagonist of Andy Weir’s newest sci-fi book, Artemis, and a soon-to-be-made feature film by producer Aditya Sood ’97.

“She resembles [The Martian’s] Mark Watney in spirit and intellect but is otherwise a completely fresh hero for the 21st century,” explains Sood, president of Genre Films, the production company behind the hit films The Martian, Deadpool and Deadpool 2.

This newest project for Sood is part of the growing change in Hollywood that Sood is excited to be a part of. “The biggest thing happening in entertainment right now is that there’s more and more options for viewers than ever before—the era of one-size-fits-all is going away,” says Sood. “You’re seeing that manifest itself in an increase of representation, in terms of the stories that are being told, the people telling the stories, and the people representing those characters on screen.”

“The superhero world—movies like Wonder Woman and Black Panther and the upcoming Captain Marvel—the success of those movies is no surprise. The smartest filmmakers and studios are getting ahead of this.”

Sood adds that there’s still a long way to go but audiences will continue to enjoy more diverse films because they continue to demand stories that reflect themselves.

He wants Pomona readers to heed his words: “I want people who read this, whether they’re students or alumni, who haven’t thought before that [the entertainment industry] speaks to them because of their backgrounds, that we need more writers, executives and producers who come from diverse backgrounds who can tell these stories authentically.”

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In films, they’re famously known as continuity errors. But these annoying little bloopers also creep into novels. For example, in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, a griffin first seen tied to a tree later finds itself tied to a fence.

While writing his 900-page tome Sacred Games, novelist Vikram Chandra ’84 found the task of avoiding such errors maddening. Keeping accurate track of his huge cast of characters over the novel’s 60-year span was a constant struggle. “It just feels like doing manual bookkeeping with a goose quill and a double ledger,” he says.

Certain that someone must have designed software to help, he did some research and found to his surprise that no such software existed. So, after finishing his novel, Chandra—who is also a programmer and self-described “geek”—decided to create his own.

“I did a couple of attempts myself,” he says, “and then realized that putting everything into a database or spreadsheet didn’t really solve the problem, because there was no connection to the text. You still had to remember every time you made a change in the text to update your data, and the other way around. So then, my question was, ‘Why not attach knowledge to text? Why can’t we keep the text and information about the text in sync, as it were?’ And that turns out to be a much, much harder problem, for various technical reasons.”

Over the following decade, the seemingly insoluble problem continued to prey on his mind. Then one night, while he was lying in bed, the answer suddenly came to him.

And so, in 2016, he joined forces with an expert programmer, Borislav Iordanov, who took his raw insights and converted them into actual code. Together they founded a company named Granthika—a Sanskrit noun for “narrator.” Their software—also called Granthika—is now patent-pending and in beta testing, and they hope to release a version for fiction writers in early 2019. Future versions may be geared to the needs of other types of writers, from journalists to scientists.

Chandra explains: “The idea is that you’ll write, ‘Jack met Mary at a café,’ and the software, if you want it to, will prompt you, saying, ‘Is Jack a person? Is Mary a person? Is café a location? Does this entire sentence represent an event?’ When you say yes to those questions, you’re creating knowledge, facts that are attached to the text at a very intimate level.”

Since writers may not want to be interrupted while writing, they can also turn that function off and go back to it later, but the final result is the same—a collection of metadata, linked directly to the text itself, to help the writer maintain the illusion of reality.

Recently, as Sacred Games was being transformed into a TV series on Netflix, Chandra wished Granthika had been available when he was writing it. To trace all of the story’s complex, interwoven timelines, the series’ creators had to buy dozens of copies of the book, transfer the info to index cards and arrange them on a wall. With Granthika, he says, “what we’re able to do is have a menu choice that says, ‘Export Ontology,’ and when you hit that, it just takes all the knowledge of the work that you created and puts it in a package so that somebody else could then import it.”

But Chandra’s vision doesn’t end there. Granthika also has him thinking about how the interactive nature of this new software might lead, someday, to the creation of new forms of interactive or multimedia books.

“Since we’re making it so easy to attach metadata to text, our dream is that we’ll be able to make it possible for a writer to say, at the time of writing, ‘When the reader reaches this sentence and goes past it, dissolve into this moving image that will last for three seconds,’ and so, you see a bird walking across the beach, right? So in a sense, what you’re doing is programming a book as much as you’re writing it. And a reader is able to interact with the book—let’s say, adjust reading difficulties, or read the same novel from the point of view of different characters, all that good science-fiction-fantasy stuff we’ve been dreaming about for the last two or three decades.”

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From Pokémon to the Marie Kondo decluttering craze, Japanese culture quickly crosses the Pacific. Costly funerals for furry friends could be next.

In Japan, mourners attend services for dogs, cats, even hamsters or birds, sitting solemnly during ceremonies officiated by Buddhist priests. Cremated remains are buried in vast pet cemeteries or stored in mausoleums that look like huge stacks of school cubbyholes, filled with flowers or small offerings of food for the afterlife. Granite markers abound, along with signs with words such as “amour,” “never forget,” and “love hurts” in various languages.

“This is big money. Somebody’s spending thousands,” says Pomona College Sociology Professor Jill Grigsby, who has conducted research on family life and animals in Japan while teaching in the Associated Kyoto Program, a joint effort of Pomona and a group of other colleges.

In the past, Japanese pets might have been buried in a yard, Grigsby says. “Now, many fewer people live in single-family homes.” Another factor might be the Japanese reverence for ceremonies.

Demographics may play a role as well. “Part of my explanation is that when you have very low fertility—and right now in the United States we’re experiencing extremely low fertility, and Japan has one of the lowest fertility rates of any country; so does Korea. People still want to create families; so they think of other ways of putting families together, which means friends, but also pets.”

Pet cemeteries exist in the U.S., but not so much formal funerals. Yet the family as it sees itself is sometimes depicted in stick figures on the back of an SUV: Mom, Dad, two kids and sometimes a dog and cat. “Animals really are members of the family,” Grigsby says.

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Move over Bear Grylls. Make way Ron Swanson. Take a back seat Naked and Afraid.

Change is coming to the world of outdoor recreation, says Martin Crawford, director of Pomona’s Outdoor Education Center (OEC). There will still be plenty of room for the extreme outdoorsmen like Grylls and the mustachioed hunters like (the fictional Parks and Recreation character) Swanson, but there’s also a growing space being made for women, people of color, queer and trans folk and other groups who in the past, have not felt comfortable or welcomed in the outdoors.

Making the outdoors experience inviting for all Pomona students has been a central part of the OEC’s mission for years now—and Chris Weyant, coordinator at the OEC, says the world of outdoors recreation is finally catching on, at least in higher education. The OEC, which coordinates the Orientation Adventure (OA) experience for all incoming new students and other outdoor education opportunities throughout the year, recruits OA leaders that represent the diversity of the new class, offers a variety of adventures at different levels, and brings in guest speakers from organizations like Latino Outdoors and Outdoor Afro. Last fall, they even added tree climbing (that’s right, tree climbing—not rock climbing) to their Outdoor Leadership class in an effort to draw a wider net of students.

Crawford says it’s important to rethink what the outdoors offers in terms of recreation and that means changing our own perception of how recreational outdoor spaces are used: “If you don’t already feel comfortable in the outdoors, you’re going to think ‘Oh, this is not for me’ and you just keep on driving [away from a state park]. But as we start changing what you do there and how we recreate, it’ll slowly start to change.”

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When Evel Knievel tried to jump the Snake River Canyon in 1974, stunts were kind of an oddity. “Now, that’s every Red Bull commercial,” says Grayson Schaffer ’01, editor at large at Outside Magazine and a co-founder at the production company Talweg Creative. After all, he points out, when the public has seen it all, the only way to grab the limelight is to up the ante, usually with a brand paying the way.

Schaffer, who has covered people doing everything from climbing Everest without oxygen to kayaking down waterfalls, is frequently interviewed by national media about the world of adventure, but he knows he hasn’t seen it all—not yet. As a recent example of death-defying acts that push the limits, he points to climber Alex Honnold’s ascent of the sheer vertical wall of El Capitan without safety gear. “You’re bringing no equipment,” he says, “just your climbing shoes and a chalk bag, and you end up climbing 2,500 feet with no ropes, no way to retreat, no way to bail out—I mean, that’s pretty crazy.”

That’s an extreme case, but among people of means, Schaffer believes, the quest for thrills is becoming the ultimate expression of conspicuous consumption. “You’re seeing the benchmarks of what people view as wealth and success shifting,” he says. “Instead of a fancy car and a big mansion, people are spending huge sums of money to be able to show off an enviable Instagram feed.” Enabling such thrill-seeking, he says, will be the growing ranks of highly skilled professional guides who can provide a measure of safety for people trying their hand at everything from backcountry skiing to summiting Mount Everest.

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A world transfixed by TV shows like “Dancing with the Stars” will soon be captivated by a new look, as more gender-fluid dancers take the floor, says Denise Machin, assistant director of the Smith Campus Center and director of The Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company.

“The future of ballroom dance is one that finds ways to stay relevant to new dancers, expanding conceptions of what a ballroom dancer looks like in body type, gender presentation and ethnicity,” Machin says.

The Claremont Colleges’ dance troupe, which just turned 20 years old, is known for its progressiveness, Machin notes, including actively placing students in dance roles not historically associated with their presenting genders.

While some colleges are actively resisting these new dance moves, and it may take a while for them to reach the small screen or the professional dance floor, Machin says inclusivity of gender expression is a centerpiece of the ballroom dance program at Pomona, adding: “Institutions like Pomona are educating a generation of artists that expect a critical and interdisciplinary approach.”

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The queen of good manners, Emily Post, died in 1960, but great-great grandson Daniel Post Senning ’99—one of the editors of the 19th edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette—is helping to carry forward the family business.

And it’s not all about forks, knives and seating arrangements.

In the world of etiquette, Senning says, the only constant is that there’s always something new to grapple with. The advent of the home telephone brought with it a fear of the end of family life. The explosion of social media raised questions about navigating online spaces. A globalized world has brought with it cultural quandaries in international business meetings.

So what’s next?

For one thing, big shifts are coming with increased questions about gender and gender identity, Senning says. Traditional gender courtesies will need to be adjusted.

The smartphone is also challenging social norms. “People are going to take more and more seriously how we show respect to each other and are able to shut off from the digital world, from the information that’s flowing around us all the time, and connect with each other as people,” he says.

Senning also predicts that the legalization of cannabis in California and other states will affect how we entertain at home. Do you offer an after-dinner joint? How do you navigate a guest who is high? Or a relative who was raised to believe that cannabis was criminal and immoral?

But for Senning, no matter how much things change, the organizing principles of etiquette always stay the same: respect and flexibility.

“Change is something we’ve survived before as a society, as individuals, as cultures all over, and things will continue to change. Changing with them, frankly, is something that we’ve done before.”

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Which nation in the “developed world” spends the most on maternity care? You guessed it—the United States. And which has the highest maternal mortality rate? Same answer, and the numbers aren’t even close.

“We are spending the most and getting the least,” says Melissa Hanna ’09, founder and CEO of Mahmee (pronounced “mommy”) “And even though we have a slowly but surely declining infant mortality rate, it’s still too high.”

That’s why Hanna founded Mahmee, a secure online platform designed to bring together a network of education and support services that expecting and new mothers and their babies need in order to thrive—from early pregnancy through the first year of an infant’s life. Hanna calls it “bundling care,” and she notes that the same model has been used successfully to manage other health-related conditions that require attentive, long-term maintenance, such as diabetes and chronic heart failure.

“Being pregnant is not considered being sick,” she says. “But I like to say having a baby is like a hormonal boomerang. Your body is prioritizing the baby over you, and so, if you think of the experience of childbirth as being this acute, physical trauma on the body, on the hormones, on the brain, why don’t we treat that as something that a person should be recovering from? If we did, it would totally change our approach to health care for women.”

Part of the problem, Hanna says, is our disconnected health care system. “One doctor, the pediatrician, is responsible for the baby, and a completely different doctor in a completely different office, using a completely different system of tools and software, is keeping track of the mother’s health. Mother and baby are connected in the womb and then outside of the womb for months after, and yet the way that we take care of them is so separated.”

In addition, most Americans don’t have the family support systems that mothers rely on in more traditional cultures. “We’re all transplants,” Hanna says. “We move around the country, away from our parents, away from our grandparents, so we end up having children in environments where we’re very isolated.”

When systemic change finally comes, Hanna believes, it’s probably going to look a lot like what other countries have done for years. “I think when we look to the future, we can look to other countries like France, like England, having a model of sort of nurse-midwifery and in-home health care,” she says. As an example, she points to the growing demand for doulas. “We end up creating a whole new industry—the industry of being a doula, which is basically being a home health assistant after delivery. That has become part of the market share in the United States, and I think that’s going to continue.”

Online services like Mahmee, which connect expecting mothers with networks of other mothers and health care experts, are also an important part of the future, Hanna believes.

“In the next few years, we’re going to see a big shift, where people start to take their Lamaze classes online, where mothers join video chat support groups,” she says. “Our company is starting to offer those, as an example, and I know that we’re not the only ones. I think that’s going to be a big way for women to connect and support each other online.”

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Rising costs and access to health care are issues that weigh heavily on Americans and their families. These issues deepen when it comes to mental health. Common mental illnesses can be extraordinarily disabling, and yet, many patients do not receive treatment.

Stephen Smith ’17 believes technology will be part of the solution.

After winning his own battle with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), the economics grad has used his experience to help others by creating a smart-phone app that provides on-the-go treatment to fight the condition.

The app, which he dubbed nOCD, records real-time data, offers guided cognitive behavioral exercises and allows people with OCD to join in-app support communities at any hour of any day. With this technology, users get 24/7 clinically approved care and are connected to a community that understands them.

“People are always wondering how you’re going to treat mental illness, given the shortage of licensed mental health clinicians,” says Smith. “And the answer is through technology.”

Smith sees this technology trend not only for mental health but for healthcare overall.

“The healthcare industry today is going ‘more mobile’ and ‘more digital’ given that technology offers consumers an always-on, personalized treatment experience,” he says. “Since the majority ‘at-risk’ populations are already actively engaged in technology, utilizing digital solutions to deliver care can have both an immediate clinical as well as an economic impact for both the patient and provider.”

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