Despite 300-something pages, the book feels compact and leaves me wanting for more. Any of these chapters could be a fantastic standalone book, and any of them raises a lot of important questions — although not necessarily ‘Lessons’ as the title suggests. Nobody has these lessons, and while Harari sometimes over-simplifies or dramatises, he acts as […]
I decided to enter this art deco building at 505 Dong Changzhi Lu, as it seemed totally deserted when I entered. Inside I discovered it to be be an old seamen’s hospital, built by colonialists in 1934. As I explored more inwards — and just as I sent a photo to my wife — I started […]
This is one of the many paragraphs from ‘H is for Hawk‘ by Helen Macdonald that stood out for me and still lingers in my mind weeks after reading it: “I think of what wild animals are in our imagination. And how they are disappearing — not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday […]
(Originally posted on Seventy-Magazine.) I’d like to give an insight on China’s ‘silver generation’, because while China’s younger generations are often in the spotlight, its senior citizens are largely ignored — despite its 150 million ‘members’ having a combined annual income of around 300-400 billion RMB. But instead of some board generalisations, here’s a slice of life […]
Photos from Suzhou, a large city (+10 million people) close to Shanghai. Taken during 2018’s ‘Golden Week’.
This vinyl record made it to Shanghai and that’s a miracle. It makes me wonder about how this music was composed around 250 years ago in a candle-lit room in Germany, and played over 60 years ago by an Englishman visiting a small city in post-war Netherlands. I wonder about the church that was built […]
This morning I watched Michael Palin visiting Shanghai in 1988. He just walks around the city of 12 million people and it’s fascinating. At three minutes there’s a car trying to get through a narrow street. At five minutes, a Chinese medicine store. At six, a Chinese duo speaking English and telling Palin they like […]
I’ve now taken two months of Mandarin classes, and last week our teacher taught us the words for cat (māo) and dog (gǒu) — and as a sort of fun extracurricular, she also explained the sounds they make: “miaow” and “wang” — or rather; how those sounds are perceived by Chinese. In the Netherlands, a […]
Helen Macdonald has written poetry before and it shows. She writes not just about things seen, but also things felt — intuitive thoughts and feelings turned into words. Macdonald writes about taming a hard-to-handle goshawk as an escape from the world and the loss of her father — and even though the subject is very […]
(A version of this also appeared on China Daily.) I find debates on objective reality not in the least useful, because eventually you arrive at the question whether all of the truths on which we base ourselves are true. And the answer has to be yes. Even if the truths we hold true would be […]