The “game” in season 1 was an emotionally charged structure that made you want to take sides between the opposing political forces. In season 2, Marks says, the game shifts to “unpredictable surprises.”

An important piece in making this change happen is the presence of Ochiba no Kata, played by Fumi Nikaido. “In season 1, the role of the ballerina (Anna Sawai) played an important role and functioned as part of the English-language side of the story. In part 2, Ochiba’s character is placed at the center of the story,” Condou says.

Her role in the story, which is based on Yodo-kun, the wife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, goes beyond the confines of recreating history. This allows the political dynamics of the women to emerge as the main focus of the story, enhancing the scale of the political drama.

Shogun’s writers and producers also have to deal with issues unique to historical dramas. History buffs, and Japanese viewers in particular, are already familiar with the outcome of the battle of Sekigahara, and any deviation from this point would cause some raised eyebrows.

Still, Marks is confident about the production’s philosophy, which is to treat culture, history, and language as “structure” rather than “material.”

“We welcome fans and history buffs who are familiar with Japanese history. We are telling a fictional story based on real history. You will be amazed at how fact and fiction blend together.”

The preferred approach to making a modern historical drama is the re-editing of history as a story, rather than as a succession of “known facts.” The Shogun production process—where Sanada and other Japanese crew members are intricately involved—ensures the cultural and historical consistency necessary to make that approach work. “Mutual respect between cultures is more important than ever,” Marks says.

SIM cards, the small slips of plastic that have held your mobile subscriber information since time immemorial, are on the verge of extinction. In an effort to save space for other components, device makers are finally dropping the SIM slot, and Google is the latest to move to embedded SIMs with the Pixel 10 series.

After long avoiding eSIM, I had no choice but to take the plunge when the time came to review Google’s new phones. And boy, do I regret it.

The Journey to eSIM

SIM cards have existed in some form since the 1990s. Back then, they were credit-card-sized chunks of plastic that occupied a lot of space inside the clunky phones of the era. They slimmed down over time, going through the miniSIM, microSIM, and finally nanoSIM eras. A modern nanoSIM is about the size of your pinky nail, but space is at a premium inside smartphones. So now there’s eSIM.

The eSIM standard was introduced in 2016, slowly gaining support as a secondary option in smartphones. Rather than holding your phone number on a removable card, an eSIM is a programmable, nonremovable component soldered to the circuit board. This allows you to store multiple SIMs and swap between them in software, and no one can swipe your SIM card from the phone. They also take up half as much space compared to a removable card, which is why OEMs have begun dropping the physical slot.

Apple was the first major smartphone maker to force the use of eSIM with the release of the iPhone 14, and it makes use of that space. The international iPhone 17 with a SIM card slot has a smaller battery than the eSIM-only version, but the difference is only about 8 percent. Google didn’t make the jump until this year with the Pixel 10 series—the US models are eSIM-only, but they unfortunately don’t have more of anything compared to the international versions.

In advance of the shift, Android got system-level support for downloading and transferring eSIMs. But whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and it’s extremely annoying when eSIM goes wrong.

Please Hold for Support

There have been times when I swapped between phones on an almost daily basis—such was the nature of reviewing phones back when there were a dozen of them coming out every month. Never once in all those countless device swaps did I have a problem with my SIM card. As such, I managed to avoid contacting carrier support for years at a time.

In the three months since Google forced me to give up my physical SIM card, I’ve needed to move my eSIM only occasionally. Still, my phone number has ended up stuck in limbo on two occasions. Android’s built-in tools work better than they used to, and I can’t say what is responsible for the eSIM corruption. However, carriers bear the responsibility for how annoying this is to fix.

The first time, I was logged in to the mobile app for my carrier (T-Mobile). After a few minutes of back-and-forth with support, I was able to use the app to authenticate and get a new eSIM pushed to the phone. It was annoying but relatively painless. The second time a SIM transfer went sideways, I was not logged in to the app, and that was a problem.

President Donald Trump has made it clear: His vision for Venezuela’s future involves the US profiting from its oil.

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies—the biggest anywhere in the world—go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” the president told reporters at a news conference Saturday, following the shocking capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife.

But experts caution that a number of realities—including international oil prices and longer-term questions of stability in the country—are likely to make this oil revolution much harder to execute than Trump seems to think.

“The disconnect between the Trump administration and what’s really going on in the oil world, and what American companies want, is huge,” says Lorne Stockman, an analyst with Oil Change International, a clean energy and fossil fuels research and advocacy organization.

Venezuela sits on some of the largest oil reserves in the world. But production of oil there has plummeted since the mid 1990s, after President Hugo Chávez nationalized much of the industry. The country was producing just 1.3 million barrels of oil each day in 2018, down from a high of more than 3 million barrels each day in the late 1990s. (The US, the top producer of crude oil in the world, produced an average of 21.7 million barrels each day in 2023.) Sanctions placed on Venezuela during the first Trump administration, meanwhile, have driven production even further down.

Trump has repeatedly implied that freeing up all that oil and increasing production would be a boon for the oil and gas industry—and that he expects American oil companies to take the lead. This kind of thinking—a natural offshoot of his “drill, baby, drill” philosophy—is typical for the president. One of Trump’s main critiques of the Iraq war, which he first voiced years before he ran for office, was that the US did not “take the oil” from the region to “reimburse ourselves” for the war.

The president views energy geopolitics “almost like the world is a Settlers of Catan board—you kidnap the president of Venezuela and, ipso facto, you now control all the oil,” says Rory Johnston, a Canadian oil market researcher. “I do think he legitimately, to a degree, believes that. It’s not true, but I think that’s an important frame for how he’s justifying and driving the momentum of his policy.”