Welmer

For centuries the people of Beijing have dwelt in neighborhoods defined above all by the hutongs, clusters of small, brick houses built around a communal courtyard, surrounded and connected to each other by a labyrinthine network of narrow alleys. Hutongs are usually enclosed by brick walls, upon which broken glass is set in a thin [...]

[Read more →]

Or so says a May 18 Guardian Observer article I came across today. Written by John Carlin, the piece extols the virtues of divorce, illegitimacy and the “patchwork families” that Carlin claims characterize Icelandic society. He goes so far as to write “Iceland could not be less like Africa on the surface,” and describes the [...]

[Read more →]

I came across an essay titled "Politics and the English Language" a few days ago and read it before going to bed. It was written by Orwell in 1946, and remains relevant today. However, the examples he uses to make his point that indirect, vague and obfuscating prose has a real influence on our thought [...]

[Read more →]

Below the pale sky on the sands of a gray beach the children played, barefoot and happy in their children’s world, plunging their little hands into the wet sand, chasing the water then running from the waves as they splashed ashore. They took little notice of the man watching them from the grassy bank at [...]

[Read more →]