Short, concise, funny — and on-point as long as you remind yourself this was written 23 years ago; yet the foundation still stands. Honesty is more important than kindness. A quarrel that has not been solved is not really over. Dutch like direct communication and a student can contradict his or her teacher. And to a […]
爽Shuǎng in Chinese means ‘feel good’, and since the new GoEast Mandarin campus is on Shanghai’s 长乐路 (Road of Eternal Happiness), I replaced the four X’s with four infinity signs (∞), so it’s like `infinite feel good` (无限爽). Scary to paint on a wall though!
I was reading ‘Journey Under the Midnight Sun’ and in praise, Keigo Higashino was compared to Agatha Christie. Then that same week, Christie was referred to in a news article about the Orient Express, and then that same week I found this book in a second-hand bookstore. Three strikes of coincidence, enough for me to […]
I was born four months before the Berlin Wall fell, two days before the B-2 Stealth Bomber made its first flight, and a month after the wreckage of Germany’s Second World War battleship the Bismarck was found, 650 kilometers west of France and 4791 meters deep into the Atlantic. That same year the World Wide […]
I’ve read some Pulizer prize winners, books from Fitzgerald, Capote, Neruda, DeLillo, Burnett, Bradbury, and Calvino and Patchett. 800 pages of Moby Dick. And then there’s this, and yet it’s such a relief reading this after all of that. Skulls and mummies in dungeons and forests. It’s the bratwurst in your hands after eating veal […]
GoEast Mandarin is a top Chinese language school, online and in Shanghai — with effective and fun teaching. I studied there, but felt that their communication lacked behind the quality of their teaching, and looked all the same as all language schools in Shanghai. My time was primarily spend on three things: Optimizing existing assets […]
In ‘The Nurture Assumption‘, Judith Rich Harris challenges the idea that children are mainly formed by their parents. In 462 pages, Harris goes over many ideas, the main one being that the environment in which children grow up has a much bigger influence on children’s future than their parents. It’s an appealing idea that should […]
Photography for GoEast Mandarin, moving to its new campus in Shanghai.
Why do we produce luxury cars while people are dying in poor countries? Why do we work on missions to Mars while our own planet has problems? Why is Starbuck’s revenue is 26,5 billion dollars, while malaria would cost 8.5 billion dollars to eradicate? Why do we worry about climate change if nuclear weapons are […]
A smoke-filled neo-noir thriller that takes place in Japan during the advent of computers and Japan’s economic boom. What’s hugely impressive is the many storylines that slowly merge and unravel. It’s the passing time too, across more than two decades and several places, yet going back and forth all the time. The atmosphere is so […]