Podcast Episode: K-Dramas And Creative Reflections

Pip: Welcome back to The World According to Cosmos, where one man's blog covers everything from Korean rom-coms to the fall of Western civilization — and usually finds a way to connect them.

Mara: Today we're moving through K-drama deep dives, the Pentagon's testosterone policy, the battle over who gets to tell America's history, a Berkeley High School play that haunted someone for fifty years, and a letter to a university president with a lot of opinions about football.

Pip: Let's start with the dramas.

K-Drama Lists And Favorites

Mara: Jake Cosmos Aller has been a devoted K-drama fan since his Korean got good enough to follow the dialogue — which he says still means mostly subtitles — and he's spent years in Korea watching the industry grow into what he calls some of "the best television being produced anywhere in the world today."

Pip: A man who once dismissed the genre is now cataloging every show from A to Z across three separate posts. That's not fandom. That's a second career.

Mara: The K-Drama Journey post lays out the landscape: rom-coms built on hate-to-love arcs, dark social critique like Parasite, political thrillers, historical epics, and an emerging sci-fi tradition. He notes that most Korean drama writers are women, and roughly sixty percent of the audience is female.

Pip: Which probably explains why the genre is so good at depicting emotional complexity and why it travels so well internationally.

Mara: His personal favorites include Crash Landing on You, Mine, Vincenzo, Mr. Sunshine, and Stranger — and he flags that LGBTQ representation is growing rapidly. Itaewon Class featured a thoughtfully developed transgender character; Mine included a lesbian relationship and a bisexual male lead.

Pip: The catalog posts — 2026 K-Drama Part 2A and Part 2B — extend this into a master list spanning A through Z, with ratings from A down to D and a TBD column that suggests the watching is ongoing.

Mara: Part 2B covers N through Z and includes titles like Squid Game, rated A, When the Camellia Blooms, also A, and Trolley, another A — alongside entries still marked TBD, which he describes as a living document he'll keep updating.

Pip: A living document. That's the diplomatic way of saying the list will never actually be finished.

Mara: From dramas to something considerably more charged — let's turn to politics.

Politics, History, and Public Debate

Mara: Jake Aller's politics posts this cycle cover four distinct but connected arguments: whether testosterone screening in the military is medicine or culture war, whether the Smithsonian is being politically captured, whether anti-communism rhetoric is seventy-five years out of date, and whether America is center-left, center-right, or something else entirely.

Pip: The testosterone post asks a genuinely interesting question: is the Pentagon confronting a real health issue, or has testosterone become a symbol in a larger battle about masculinity and national decline?

Mara: On July 15, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a new policy requiring annual testosterone-deficiency screening for service members age thirty and older. Hegseth framed it as a readiness issue — ensuring troops have, in his words, the "biological foundation" to perform at their best.

Pip: Critics pointed out that the Pentagon didn't identify specific research justifying universal screening for all troops over thirty, and that several men's health experts questioned whether widespread screening would meaningfully improve combat readiness.

Mara: Aller's analysis is genuinely even-handed here. He acknowledges that testosterone matters for physical performance, that military service is hard on the body, and that men's health issues are often ignored. But he also argues that the deeper problem — loneliness, economic insecurity, declining social trust — is not a hormone deficiency.

Pip: "Loneliness is not a hormone deficiency." That's the line the whole post builds toward, and it lands.

Mara: The Smithsonian posts — both the original and the update — cover the Trump administration's campaign against federal cultural institutions. Executive Order 14253, "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," directed agencies to remove content the administration described as ideologically rather than factually driven.

Pip: The order specifically criticized the Smithsonian for what it called a "divisive, race-centered ideology." A follow-up order directed the National Park Service to install signage outside the National Museum of American History warning visitors that exhibits should be renovated.

Mara: National Museum of American History Director Anthea Hartig testified in response: "We preserve and document the evidence of American life in all of its breadth, so that the public can encounter the past and draw their own conclusions."

Pip: Former Trump insider Olivia of Troye called the signage directive "Putin-style government propaganda." That's a strong phrase, and Aller quotes it directly.

Mara: The more Communist BS post takes on the administration's anti-communism rhetoric. Trump invoked communism 81 times in roughly two weeks, describing some progressive Democrats as "hardcore, godless communists." Aller's position is blunt: communism effectively died with the Soviet Union in 1991, and the rhetoric reflects thinking stuck in the late 1950s.

Pip: AOC put it more concisely: "We can't even raise the minimum wage. Do Republicans really think this stuff is going to happen?"

Mara: The Is America Center-Left, Center-Right post draws on Pew Research's 2026 Political Typology, which sorts Americans into nine groups rather than two. The core finding: many voters hold combinations of views that don't map cleanly onto either party's activist base.

Pip: Aller places himself in the Leftward Progressives category — about seven percent of Americans — and his wife in the Pragmatic and Polite Right. He notes his brothers are in the Unconventional Right and, puzzlingly to him, the pro-Putin camp.

Mara: From the battle over American memory to a very different kind of memory — fifty years of carrying a high school play.

Writing, Poetry, and Personal Work

Mara: The Serpent Updates post is built around a 1974 Berkeley High School production of Jean-Claude van Itallie's experimental play The Serpent, which Aller performed in as a teenager. He's also in the photograph — bottom row, second from the left.

Pip: The Serpent wasn't a conventional play. It was a ceremony. Movement, chanting, ensemble work, and fragments of text exploring the Book of Genesis alongside modern history, including the Snake's point of view. For a public high school to stage it, Aller writes, says something about Berkeley High at that time.

Mara: Decades later, he found himself returning to that voice in his own writing. The post includes two poems — "I Am the Snake" and "Eve Eats the Apple" — both retelling Eden from the serpent's perspective. "I Am the Snake" was published on All Poetry, "Eve Eats the Apple" on Spillwords.

Pip: He also performed in The Madwoman of Chaillot, where he played a server with one line — and accidentally said "the Madwoman of Berkeley" instead of "the Madwoman of Chaillot" because his mother was in the audience. She laughed. The audience laughed. He never forgot it.

Mara: The Love Haiku Update announces that five of his haiku were accepted by The Haikuist for their inaugural anthology, which will be submitted to the Haiku Foundation's Touchstone Distinguished Book Award and sent to the U.S. Library of Congress. The haiku are drawn from his true love story — meeting his wife first in a dream in 1974, then on a bus in Korea in 1982.

Pip: Married the Lady of My Dreams and the Where to Find Cosmos on the Web posts round out this segment — the first a prose retelling of that same love story published in Inkit and Chicken Soup for the Soul, the second a directory of his presence across roughly thirty platforms.

Mara: Thirty platforms. The man is thorough.

Pip: Let's move to the last stretch — reviews, travel, and life notes.

Reviews, Travel, and Life Notes

Mara: The University of the Pacific post is a letter to UOP President Christopher Callahan congratulating the university on its plans to open a School of Medicine in Stockton by 2030 — which Aller notes was first discussed when he was a student there in 1979.

Pip: He graduated in 1979 with a dual degree in Political Science and Humanistic Psychology, went to the Peace Corps, then graduate school, then twenty-seven years in the Foreign Service. He has opinions about what the new medical school should look like, and he shares all of them — free tuition, service commitments, integrated AI coursework, mandatory study abroad, and, yes, bringing back football.

Mara: The Korean Hikes post is a comprehensive guide to trails, rivers, stream parks, rail-to-trail corridors, and national parks across Korea, drawn from decades of hiking since his Peace Corps arrival in 1979.

Pip: The Re-entry to the USA post grades the American re-entry experience for 2026. Americans get an A. Foreign visitors get a C or D. Trans travelers get an F. Air Premia gets a C — direct flight to Dulles, but the entertainment was, in his words, "way below global standards."

Mara: The Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education reviews are part of his ongoing classics reading project. On Bovary: Emma is "not simply immoral — she is modern." On Sentimental Education: Frédéric Moreau is "selfish and narcissistic, not exactly a villain, but not a good person either."

Pip: A man who has spent years reading classic literature and a lifetime watching K-dramas has arrived at the same conclusion about both: the most interesting characters are the ones who want things they can't quite name and can't quite reach.

Mara: Which, when you think about it, describes most of the posts on this blog.

Pip: Testosterone, Smithsonian signage, Eden from the snake's perspective, and a letter about football to a university president. That's one site's output in a single cycle.

Mara: Next time we'll see whether the K-drama list gets longer, whether the medical school gets funded, and whether the Grim Reaper shows up again — he's been a recurring character.

Pip: He always does.