France Will Soon Ban Disposable Vapes Under an Anti-Smoking Plan

PARIS — French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said Sunday that disposable vapes will soon be banned in the country as part of a national anti-smoking plan.

Borne, speaking on RTL radio, did not say when the ban would enter into force.

She said the government would soon unveil its new plan to combat smoking, which she said is the cause of 75,000 deaths a year in the country.

It will include a ban on disposable vapes, which she said “are giving bad habits to young people.”

“It’s a reflex and a gesture that young people get used to. That’s how they get into smoking,” she added.

Most of the disposable e-cigarettes, which are thrown away after they’re used up, come in sweet and fruity flavors like pink lemonade, gummy bear and watermelon that makes them attractive to teenagers. They are sold in France usually at a price of between 8 euros ($8.7) and 12 euros ($13).

An existing ban on the sale of electronic cigarette devices to those under 18 is not widely respected. Promoting or advertising such products is also banned.

source https://time.com/6310444/france-soon-ban-disposable-vapes/

Taiwan Suspends Work, Transport and Classes as Typhoon Haikui Slams into the Island

BEIJING — Much of southern Taiwan came to a standstill Sunday as Typhoon Haikui churned over towns and farmland. Residents were urged to stay home and flights, rail transport, ferry services, classes and outdoor events were suspended, but there were no reports of injuries or serious damage.

The storm made landfall in Taitung county on the Pacific-facing east coast around 3 p.m. (0700 GMT) Sunday, bringing sustained winds of 155 kph (96 mph) and gusts of 190 kph (120 mph).

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The winds and driving rains forced in unsecured doors, uprooted trees — at least one of which crushed a parked minivan — and caused flooding in some low-lying areas.

By Sunday evening, almost 4,000 people had been evacuated from mountain communities that are at high risk of landslides and flooding, according to the Interior Ministry. Families brought sleeping mats and other necessities to school gymnasiums and public meeting halls, where they were provided with food and drink.

About 75,000 homes temporarily lost power in Taitung and Hualien counties along the east coast, and a guesthouse collapsed on Green Island just off the coast, but no injuries were reported.

There appeared to be little serious damage, and some shops remained open, partly to dispose of locally grown fruits and vegetables that would otherwise go to waste.

Among events canceled in Taiwan were a hot air balloon festival in the central Taichung region, several outdoor concerts, art events and a baseball game. National parks and treacherous roads in the island’s mountainous center were also closed.

Haikui is expected to continue toward China after crossing over Taiwan, and authorities in the Chinese city of Shantou in Guangdong province were advising residents to take precautions.

Haikui arrived as Typhoon Saola continued to weaken while swirling along the Chinese coast, where 900,000 people and 80,000 fishing vessels had been moved to safety. Most of Hong Kong and parts of the coastal mainland had suspended business, transport and classes.

Damage appeared to be minimal, however, and restrictions had largely been lifted by Sunday. On Saturday night, the Hong Kong Observatory had canceled all warnings.

Because of Typhoon Saola, workers in a number of Chinese cities stayed at home and students saw the start of their school year postponed from Friday to Monday. Trading on Hong Kong’s stock market was suspended and hundreds of people were stranded at the airport after about 460 flights were canceled in the key regional business and travel hub.

The cross-border bridge connecting Hong Kong, the gambling hub of Macao and manufacturing center of Zhuhai was closed at one point, with Macao leader Ho Iat Seng ordering a halt to casino operations.

In recent months, China has experienced some of its heaviest rains and deadliest flooding in years. Dozens of people have been killed, including in outlying mountainous parts of the capital, Beijing.

Despite the twin storms, China’s military continued to conduct operations meant to intimidate Taiwan, a self-ruled democracy that Beijing seeks to bring under Chinese sovereignty by force if necessary.

Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said it was monitoring the movements of Chinese military aircraft and navy ships near the island. However, it said there were no indications any had crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait or entered Taiwan’s air defense identification zone as they frequently do.

source https://time.com/6310441/taiwan-suspends-work-transport-typhoon-haiku/

Executive Educator Dominique Turpin on How Businesses Can Keep Adding Value

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Who do the world’s most powerful CEOs turn to when they need advice? Dominique Turpin would be high on the list.

From 2010 until 2016, Turpin served as president of Switzerland’s International Institute for Management Development (IMD), whose MBA program regularly ranks among the world’s best. The French-born—“OK, nobody’s perfect,” he shrugs—consultant and management educator has worked with many of the world’s top companies, including Coca-Cola, Danone, Jardine Matheson, Nestlé, Novo Nordisk, Philips and Uponor.

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In September 2022, Turpin accepted a new post as president of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), based in Shanghai. For Turpin, it’s a welcome return to a continent that has long fascinated him; he earned a doctorate in economics from Sophia University in Tokyo in 1986 and has written several books on Japanese business culture.

CEIBS was established in 1994 as a joint venture between the Chinese government and E.U. to foster business ties and understanding between Asia and Europe. Yet in recent years geopolitics and the pandemic have rendered that laudable mission statement even more challenging. TIME sat down with Turpin in Singapore to talk about his goals for the school, frictions between the East and West, the health of China’s economy, and the future of marketing.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You’ve just returned from the U.S. where you met with the deans of Harvard, Wharton, and MIT among several other top schools. What were your aims and takeaways from that trip?

We used to have good connections with U.S. schools [before the pandemic]. Our students would have one module in Africa, one in Europe, and one in the U.S. So we want to rebuild that. But what was interesting [was] when I talked to some of these deans in the United States, one of them said, ‘you know, we’re under pressure from the American government to reduce activities in China. But we’re not going to do that. On the contrary, when you have this tension, it’s our role to bring more mutual understanding.’ So I think this is a role that business has to play.

You taught at IMD for 30 years. How does its mission statement differ from your role at CEIBS?

IMD was started by industry to serve industry. At CEIBS, what I think we can offer to the world is a different perspective. What is interesting is that when I was in the United States last week, compared with when I visited a private bank a few days ago in Geneva, or here [in Singapore], you get a different perspective on China. And I was amazed by the very negative feeling toward China in the United States. But when you’re in China, and you hear different arguments, such as: how many military bases do the Americans have around the world? So we must try to have a better balance.

I imagine that CEIBS is not just about teaching Chinese executives Western business strategy. Presumably there’s lots that American executives can also learn from their Chinese peers?

There are a lot of interesting things happening in China, even though there is a rebalancing to the public sector from the private sector. I’ve met a lot of super interesting companies with great global growth potential. For example, I was in Shenzhen last month and visited a company called Hofan. To me, this is the ultimate marketing company. Because the purpose of marketing is to create, communicate, and deliver value to customers. And you do this by solving problems. Now, this company goes on social media and reads all the comments by consumers. They take this feedback to some Chinese company and say, ‘hey, you need to solve this problem.’ They even have a venture capital firm to help the company fund the development and then they market these products. To me, this is your ultimate marketing machine. So when it comes to understanding customer needs, yes, as a marketing professor there’s some interesting things to look at [in China].

Is it fair to say that Chinese companies are more paternalistic, more top down, and don’t take advice as much from outside? For instance, they’re more reluctant to bring in consultants like PWC or Deloitte compared with American firms.

This part of the world is driven by Confucian values. I went to Japan for the very first time in 1978 and the economic development of China is not very different from what we have seen in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. There is a certain pattern moving from low value, adding products and services to [higher-value]. The difference with China is scale.

China is facing some economic turbulence right now. How concerned are you?

The big issue right now is unemployment and also the real estate issue. And what is interesting is that the Chinese middle class sacrifice a lot to do two things: to buy an apartment, because it’s a kind of safety net, and to educate their children. This phenomenon is quite worrying because … as long as the economy goes well people are less inclined to speak politics. But if it doesn’t, this could be very worrying for China. At the same time, 2022 was the best year ever for Chinese exports. So you have to put everything into perspective.

CEIBS is a joint venture between the E.U. and the Chinese government. But in 2019 the E.U. declared China a “systemic rival.” That must make your job harder?

For me, ‘Europe’ does not exist. Germany has bet heavily on both China and Russia. If you look at a company like BMW, or Volkswagen, I think [33% in fiscal year 2022] of BMW’s global sales were in China. If you look at the French, they are less dependent on China. And this is why Europe is somewhat divided—because the German Chancellor is saying, ‘let’s not be too hard on the Chinese,’ because they have their own interests. The French sell wines and cosmetics and Louis Vuitton bags, but they are less dependent on the Chinese market than the Germans.

The other thing, of course, is that China represents 40% of global trade. So imagine, a slowdown on the Chinese economy today will have repercussions on Africa, for example, because they are buying raw materials. You know, 5% of the growth of Africa today is coming from trade with China. So, China is important to the world.

When you first came to CEIBS you talked about opening a U.S. campus. Is that still the plan?

Well, it’s sensitive. Because it’s a [joint-venture] I cannot take a decision alone. And the Chinese tend to be very prudent, want a low profile. It’s political. If you follow what happened in Hungary, where [Fudan] University wanted to open a campus, it went into the newspapers, and then the citizens [protested]. Losing face could be another factor.

Your specialty is marketing. But how do businesses stay ahead when digital marketing—like the recent advances by AI and TikTok—evolve so quickly? At the same time, you’ve got marketing professors teaching the same lectures year after year. It seems like the value of the business school is almost diminished?

You have a point. When I was at IMD, Coca-Cola got in touch about creating a chair and some research on digital marketing. In Lausanne, Switzerland, I’m 500 miles away from Philip Morris International quarters and 10 km away from Nestle. So I went to see the global CMO of Nestle and the CEO of Philip Morris. They laughed at me and said, “you guys are too slow! By the time you do your research and you polish your papers” [because things have moved on]. So the ones who are eating our lunch are the consultants when you look at digital transformation.

On the other hand, the mission of marketing has not changed: create value for customers. Marketing professors really don’t talk so much about the needs and wants of customers, because in modern economies people don’t know what they want. Nobody wrote an email to Steve Jobs [saying]: “I want an iPhone or an iPad.” The word I personally use is: what are your customers’ headaches? The world is not short of headaches, but what has changed dramatically are the [marketing] tools.

What are some business challenges that might not get sufficient attention?

I was talking to a top guy at Nestle about diversity, which is another big buzzword these days. And he said there is one element of diversity that is critical to us but nobody talks about: the age pyramid. Today, 20-year-olds when they join Nestle go straight into the job. I mean, 20 years ago you would send them to sell ice cream in Brazil for six months. Today, you have a 20-year-old who is highly specialized in all these digital tools. And you won’t find the global chief marketing officer in a big corporation who is under 45—and we want to push for later retirements! So how do you bring all these generations of people in the company together? That’s another challenge.

source https://time.com/6310388/dominique-turpin-ceibs-interview/

DeSantis Won’t Meet with Biden During President’s Trip to Survey Idalia Damage

WASHINGTON — Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ‘ office said Friday that he has “no plans” to meet with President Joe Biden when the Democrat flies to Florida this weekend to survey damage from Hurricane Idalia, suggesting that doing so could hinder disaster response.

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“In these rural communities, and so soon after impact, the security preparations alone that would go into setting up such a meeting would shut down ongoing recovery efforts,” DeSantis spokesman Jeremy Redfern said in a statement.

Idalia made landfall Wednesday morning along Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 3 storm, causing widespread flooding and damage before moving north to drench Georgia and the Carolinas. Biden is set to fly to Florida on Saturday to tour the damage personally.

DeSantis preemptively heading off a meeting contradicts Biden himself, who, when asked after an event at the White House earlier Friday whether he would meet with DeSantis during his trip to Florida, replied, “Yes.”

It’s also a break from the recent past, since Biden and DeSantis met when the president toured Florida after Hurricane Ian hit the state last year, and following the Surfside condo collapse in Miami Beach in summer 2021. But DeSantis is now running for president, and he only left the Republican primary trail last week with Idalia barreling toward his state.

White House spokeswoman Emilie Simons responded, “President Biden and the first lady look forward to meeting members of the community impacted by Hurricane Idalia and surveying impacts of the storm.”

“Their visit to Florida has been planned in close coordination” with the Federal Emergency Management Agency “as well as state and local leaders to ensure there is no impact on response operations,” Simons said in her own statement.

The politics of putting aside rivalries following natural disasterscan indeed be tricky.

Another 2024 presidential candidate, former Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, was widely criticized in GOP circles for embracing then-President Barack Obama during a tour of damage 2012’s Hurricane Sandy did to his state. Christie was even asked about the incident last month, during the first Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee.

Both Biden and DeSantis at first said helping storm victims would outweigh politics, but DeSantis began suggesting that logistical problems could complicate a presidential visit as the week wore on.

“There’s a time and a place to have political season,” the governor said before Idalia made landfall. “But then there’s a time and a place to say that this is something that’s life threatening, this is something that could potentially cost somebody their life, it could cost them their livelihood.”

By Friday, the governor was telling reporters of Biden, “one thing I did mention to him on the phone” was “it would be very disruptive to have the whole security apparatus that goes” with the president “because there are only so many ways to get into” many of the hardest hit areas.

“What we want to do is make sure that the power restoration continues and the relief efforts continue and we don’t have any interruption in that,” DeSantis said. The statement about not planning to meet came later, and Redfern pointed to the governor’s previous comments when asked how Idalia’s aftermath might differ from that of Ian or the Surfside collapse when DeSantis and Biden met.

DeSantis has built his White House bid around dismantling what he calls Democrats’ “woke” policies. DeSantis also frequently draws applause at GOP rallies by declaring that it’s time to send “Joe Biden back to his basement,” a reference to the Democrat’s Delaware home, where he spent much of his time during the early lockdowns of the coronavirus pandemic.

Still, Biden suggested earlier in the week that he and DeSantis were cooperating easily. While delivering pizzas to workers at FEMA’s Washington headquarters, the president said he’d spoken to DeSantis so frequently about Idalia that “there should be a direct dial” between the pair.

Homeland Security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall pointed to the experiences after Ian and Surfside when telling reporters at the White House this week that Biden and DeSantis “are very collegial when we have the work to do together of helping Americans in need, citizens of Florida in need.”

And yet, the post-Idalia politics could be complicated for both sides.

The president announced his bid for reelection in April but has mostly refrained from campaigning, preferring instead to lead by governing. The White House is now seeking an additional $4 billion to address natural disasters as part of its supplemental funding request to Congress — bringing the total to $16 billion and illustrating that wildfires, flooding and hurricanes that have intensified during a period of climate change are imposing ever higher costs on U.S. taxpayers.

DeSantis, meanwhile, is facing questions about whether his campaign can survive for the long haul. Four months before the first ballots are to be cast in Iowa’s caucuses, DeSantis still lags far behind former President Donald Trump, the Republican primary’s dominant early front-runner. And he has cycled through repeated campaign leadership shakeups and reboots of his image in an attempt to refocus his message.

The super PAC supporting DeSantis’ candidacy has halted its door-knocking operations in Nevada, which votes third on the Republican presidential primary calendar, and several states holding Super Tuesday primaries in March — a further sign of trouble.

source https://time.com/6310424/desantis-wont-meet-with-biden-idalia-damage/

Nobel Foundation Withdraws Invitation to Russia, Belarus and Iran to Attend Ceremonies

STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Foundation on Saturday withdrew its invitation for representatives of Russia, Belarus and Iran to attend this year’s Nobel Prize award ceremonies after the decision announced a day earlier “provoked strong reactions.”

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Several Swedish lawmakers said Friday they would boycott this year’s Nobel Prize award ceremonies in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, after the private foundation that administers the prestigious awards changed its position from a year earlier and invited representatives of the three countries to attend, saying it “promotes opportunities to convey the important messages of the Nobel Prize to everyone.”

Some of the lawmakers cited Russia’s war on Ukraine and the crackdown on human rights in Iran as reasons for their boycott. Belarusian opposition figure Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya on Friday called on the Swedish Nobel Foundation and the Norwegian Nobel Committee not to invite representatives of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s “illegitimate regime to any events.”

On Saturday, she welcomed the Nobel Foundation’s decision. She told The Associated Press that it was “a clear sign of solidarity with the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples.”

“This is how you show your commitment to the principles and values of Nobel,” Tsikhanouskaya said.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, who said Friday he wouldn’t have allowed the three countries to participate in the award ceremonies, was also happy with the decision. He posted on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, that “the many and strong reactions show that the whole of Sweden unambiguously stand on Ukraine’s side against Russia’s appalling war of aggression.”

The foundation said Saturday it recognized “the strong reactions in Sweden, which completely overshadowed this message” and therefore it had decided not to invite the ambassadors of Russia, Belarus and Iran to the award ceremony in Stockholm.

However, it said that it would follow its usual practice and invite all ambassadors to the ceremony in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded.

Saturday’s announcement was widely praised in Sweden by politicians. Even the Swedish Royal House reacted with spokeswoman Margareta Thorgren saying, as quoted by newspaper Aftonbladet, that “we see the change in the decision as positive”. She added that King Carl XVI Gustaf was planning to hand out this year’s Nobel awards at ceremonies in Stockholm “as before.”

This year’s Nobel prize winners will be announced in early October. The laureates are then invited to receive their awards at glittering prize ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of award founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.

source https://time.com/6310420/nobel-foundation-withdraws-invitation-russia-belarusiran/

Want to Honor Labor Day? Check Your Paystub

There’s a better way to honor Labor Day this year than shopping, hitting the beach, or BBQing. Take a few minutes to look at your paystub.

Most Americans don’t anymore. Paystubs or payslips used to come with the physical checks that Americans would get every two weeks or once a month. Now, a lot of Americans get their pay directly deposited into their bank accounts. They have to go looking for information on how much they earned and what was deducted for taxes, 401(k) contributions, and other employee benefits.

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There are a lot of good reasons to check your paystub. First and foremost, there’s a problem with a wage theft in this country. Americans also need to make sure that they are getting the employee benefits (like health insurance) that they signed up for. Equally important, however, is that the many deductions on a paystub are a powerful reminder of how hard and long Americans have fought for shorter hours, livable wages, and better working conditions, all of which made life on and off the job a whole lot better.

The Federal Income Contributions Act (FICA) deduction, for instance, captures the meaning of Labor Day better than any picnic. When Americans get their first paychecks, many probably asked, like Rachel Green on Friends, “What’s FICA? Why’s he getting all my money?”

Congress passed FICA in 1935 so that employees and employers could pay for the much more well-known 1935 Social Security Act. This landmark legislation included a lot more than federal pensions, or what most Americans mean now when they say the words “Social Security.” Labor Secretary Frances Perkins addressed Americans on Feb. 25, 1935 over the radio to explain that the most important part of the bill before Congress was insurance against unemployment. She called it “the greatest of all hazards.” At the time, unemployment was 20%. More than 10 million Americans could “plunge into destitution and dependency” while they searched for a job.

Read More: This Labor Day, Workers Are Having a Moment. It’s Not the First Time

There would also be money for “old-age security” in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration’s broad plan for economic security (which also included support for the blind, child welfare, and public health). But Roosevelt did not take credit for that legislation. Three years after passage, when that law had already helped millions, Roosevelt attributed its success to the American labor movement. “The underlying desire for personal and family security was nothing new,” he insisted in a radio address on August 15, 1938.

Friends, neighbors, and family members had always been a source of security, but people needed more support as the country industrialized. The first to turn to the federal government for help during the country’s tumultuous industrialization had been the rich, not the poor.  As noted by Roosevelt, the wealthy profited the most from “protective laws designed, in the main, to give security to property owners, to industrialists, to merchants and to bankers.” That elite also fought workers organizing unions and demanding “protective labor legislation.” “While such laws raised the standard of life,” Roosevelt stressed, “they still gave no assurance to economic security.” So the federal government had to “help [individuals] lay the foundation stones” for better lives on and off the job. 

“It is not good enough,” the president admitted in that speech. Citizens needed health care and sick leave. Millions also did not qualify for these protections because they picked crops, cleaned houses, or worked public sector jobs. “This must be set right,” Roosevelt said. “And it will be.”

Americans are, of course, still waiting. Congress had originally limited Social Security because business leaders had lobbied hard to keep its guarantees meager; they wanted Americans to continue to rely on them for basic needs, like pensions and health insurance plans. Conservatives in both parties had also demanded agricultural, domestic, and public employees be excluded, which effectively stopped the Roosevelt Administration from offering a New Deal to Black communities in the Jim Crow South, as well as to the many people of color laboring in the West. A few months after Roosevelt’s radio address demanding more, the midterm elections decimated liberal ranks in Congress.

Afterwards, expansion was slow and fitful. Congress haltingly increased the workers eligible for social security benefits after World War II. But 30 years passed before Congress amended the Social Security Act to include Medicare, which the FICA deduction also pays for. Only “a small amount each payday” will be deducted, President Lyndon B. Johnson promised in his 1965 remarks at the signing of the Medicare bill. “The employer will contribute a similar amount.” He vowed that medical costs would no longer be a burden on families. Of course, Americans young and old still struggle with medical debt, even if they have coverage from an employer (which is often deducted from their paychecks) or have bought a plan through the health insurance exchanges that the 2010 Affordable Care Act set up.

Having a paystub has mattered more since Obamacare’s passage on March 23, 2010. Unemployment compensation, Medicare coverage, social security payments, and other federal programs helped millions during both the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic when a growing number of Americans worked as independent contractors, not employees. Those semantics kept payroll costs down and profits up for companies in many different sectors. The most notorious firms are in the app-based gig economy. Gig companies, like Uber and Doordash, do not offer drivers benefits, like health insurance. They also don’t deduct for or pay employment taxes, like FICA.

Gig workers, many of whom were considered essential during the pandemic, shoulder the real cost of convenient rides and fast deliveries. They pay taxes directly to state and federal governments. They even owe twice as much for FICA because they must cover what employees and employers are expected to contribute. It is no wonder that gig workers have also been on the frontlines of city and state efforts to regulate this new app-based economy—just like the citizens Roosevelt recognized as responsible for Social Security in 1935.

So take a look at your paystub on Labor Day. It is a memorial to the ordinary Americans who labored for something better—and a reminder that the struggle for basic workplace rights and recognition continues.

source https://time.com/6309751/labor-day-paystub-essay/

How The Wheel of Time Season 2 Departs From the Book Series

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Wheel of Time

The Wheel of Time is back for a second season and promises to be a wild and weird ride for fans of the books that inspired the Amazon Prime series. The end of season 1 saw some fairly major divergences from the first novel of the book series by Robert Jordan, and many fans had issues with those changes—even if some deviations from canon were likely dictated by circumstances, rather than on purpose.

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Production on season 1 of The Wheel of Time was plagued with problems, mostly related to multiple Covid-related work stoppages, but also from the departure of Barney Harris, the actor playing Mat Cauthon, one of the central characters of the story, before production was complete. The specifics of why Harris left the series were never clarified, but it necessitated a marked change in how the story progressed in the show versus how it did in the books. Instead of going to the Eye of the World with the rest of his friends, Mat abandoned them and ended up returning to Tar Valon, the city of the Aes Sedai. Though far from the only way the show departed from the books, it was definitely one of the most significant, and altogether left many fans questioning whether season 2 would get the story back on track.

Read More: How Amazon’s The Wheel of Time Stacks Up Against Its Source Material

Based on the first four episodes of season 2, the answer is both yes and no. But so far, that seems to be a good thing, even if it may deprive some book fans of some of their more cherished scenes from the original story.

Taking the road differently traveled

Season 2, premiering Sept. 1 on Amazon Prime with three new episodes, ostensibly follows the events of The Great Hunt, the second book in The Wheel of Time series. But from the start, things are already going very differently. At the beginning of the book, for example, all the main characters, including Rand al’Thor and Mat Cauthon, reconvene at the walled city of Fal Dara, where Moiraine sets her machinations in motion for the Two Rivers folk, and (among other things) Rand meets with the leader of the Aes Sedai, Siuan Sanche, who tells him he is the Dragon Reborn. When the Shienaran lord Ingtar sets out for his hunt for the fabled Horn of Valere, Rand, Mat and Perrin all go with him.

None of this occurs in the first few episodes of the show. Rand, having faked his death at the end of the first season, has instead traveled to the city of Cairhien alone, where he has embarked on a casual sexual relationship with a mysterious and beautiful innkeeper named Selene, while working at a sanitarium in the city for purposes of his own. Mat has been taken captive in the White Tower by the Red Sister Liandrin Sedai, and befriends a fellow prisoner named Min Farshaw, the reluctant seer and fortune teller we met in the first season. Perrin, meanwhile, is the sole Two Riversian to go with Ingtar on his hunt for the Horn, where they run afoul of a mysterious invading force named the Seanchan, with muzzled women who can channel, led by a Lady Suroth. 

To fans of the novels, this will all seem like a bizarre progression of events indeed. Even Egwene and Nynaeve’s adventures in the Tower, which so far adhere much more closely to their book counterparts, are slowly diverging from the events as they happened in the novels.

Read More: The 34 Most Anticipated TV Shows of Fall 2023

As a longtime fan of the books, watching the events of the first few episodes of season 2 unfold has been like watching a game of Telephone: each change in the story, inadvertent or otherwise, generates another and another, resulting in a bizarre funhouse version that is sort of like the original, but hopelessly distorted by all the iterations in between. Somehow, though, it works for the show, adhering to the spirit of The Wheel of Time books, rather than to the letter.

The differences have turned out to be more fascinating than upsetting, making it so that someone who is intimately familiar with the original version will only have the broadest idea of how this version of the story will proceed. It means that even though I knew very well that a certain ambiguously portrayed character would indeed turn out to be evil, for instance, the way in which they were exposed was genuinely shocking. 

Everything is mixed up: things that happen much later happen earlier, and vice versa; characters who never interact or barely interact in the novels are now intimately involved with each other; things that happen in one place happen in another. It’s not clear how (or whether) the show will manage to keep everything moving in the eventual correct direction, but it’s going to be very interesting to watch them try.

The Mat Cauthon sized elephant in the room

The biggest question most fans want to know about season 2, of course, is: How does the recast character of Mat Cauthon, now played by Irish actor Dónal Finn, fare compared to Harris’ portrayal of him in season 1? Opinions will vary, of course, but after reviewing the first four episodes, it’s clear Finn has done an excellent job of stepping into Harris’ shoes, settling well into that irreverent, roguish air that makes Mat a fan favorite. Compared with Harris, Finn’s Mat is more jaded and perhaps a bit bitter at the lousy hand he’s been dealt since we saw him last, but he’s also refusing to let it quash his spirit—or his snark.

The only real downside with Mat is in how the show has altered his storyline, meaning that some of his more iconic scenes from the books are unlikely to occur in the show. For example, in one moment from the books, Mat inadvertently finds himself in a duel with two prospective Warders in the White Tower, armed with only a quarterstaff while his opponents wield swords—and he defeats them both, decisively. The scene, besides being gripping in its own right, is our first indication that Mat just may be more than he seems, and a force to be reckoned with; but the way Mat’s story unfolds in the show, that never happens—at least not yet.

Read More: 8 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books That Deserve a Screen Adaptation

Likewise, it is unclear how the ways Mat becomes a hero in the books—or any of the ways Rand, Perrin, Egwene, and Nynaeve become heroes, for that matter—will come to pass in the show, if at all. The show, having been forced off the path of the original story, has clearly decided to lean into it, rather than scramble back to the path laid by the books. 

Screen adaptations of books cannot ever be an exact replica of the stories that drew in ardent fans—but the hope is that they turn out to be worthy of love in their own right. As The Wheel of Time journeys into season 2, it will be intriguing to see whether the show achieves that end.

source https://time.com/6310201/wheel-of-time-season-2-explained/