Welmer

As a child of the 1970s, for my entire life I have lived and breathed the doom-and-gloom philosophy that supplanted the old post-war faith in human progress. A misanthropic world-view, dominant following the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s, hammered the younger generation with one apocalyptic prophecy after another. Movies such as Soylent Green, [...]

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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 [...]

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According to statistics, adultery is on the rise in America. Much is made of the fact that wives are cheating nearly as much as husbands these days. Since the statistics come from polls, and women are less likely to admit to adultery than men for both cultural and practical reasons, it is likely that men [...]

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The new realities of an energy-deficient world will inevitably create an economic shift away from our current service-oriented economy to the production of commodities. Unlike any other time in history, the production of food has been a relatively small part of our economic output for decades, with only a small fraction of our population actively [...]

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