Archive - Culture & curiosity

New Top Discussion

“The elites may be disproportionately monolingual.” — Workshop participant Earlier this year, I spent International Mother Language Day facilitating…

May 23

First, this week, I spotted a sheet weaver in our back garden. I’m sure it’s a new species to arrive there, as I had to google the beautiful spider…

May 15

Anticipating rain that didn’t come, we went to see Sing 2 in a cinema in Zeeland on Saturday. Except for Bono, a great movie. (Bono voices a musician…

May 9

We’re fortunate in Amsterdam to have the John Adams Institute. We’re even happier that they’ve started releasing some of their lectures as podcasts…

Apr 30

“Geotagged iPhone photos are often some of my only clues that I have been somewhere or done something; I cherish them as proof that I, at one point…

Apr 25

Thanks to the Romans’ shenanigans almost two thousand years ago, this irregular update is late. My apologies. While some say it is winter in Europe…

Apr 19

One: Congratulations to the Rijksmuseum and their collaboration with Guerrilla in Horizon Forbidden West. It’s lovely to see old and new art merge and…

Apr 11

“Human history is a race between education and catastrophe.” — HG Wells quoted in Imagine if… I have a bachelors in educational science, which I haven’t…

Apr 4

In a case of frequency illusion, I’ve been bouncing between The Sun Also Rises and For Whom The Bell Tolls this week. Both, of course, are Hemingway…

Mar 27

Two years to the day after I fled home on my bike from a meeting, trying to outrun the “novel Corona virus,” I finally tested positive. Fit, vaccinated…

Mar 20

I stopped reading when Putin re-ignited his war in Ukraine. I had just started in These Truths, which I had been looking forward to since I had put it…

Mar 14

In July of 1914, the Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez found himself on a boat traveling from Buenos Aires to Paris. The first signs of the…

Mar 4

#nojs-banner { position: fixed; bottom: 0; left: 0; padding: 16px 16px 16px 32px; width: 100%; box-sizing: border-box; background: red; color: white; font-family: -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px; } #nojs-banner a { color: inherit; text-decoration: underline; } This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts