I won’t be teaching any marketing this semester because my visa doesn’t allow it. I won’t miss the two-hour inner-city travel from Yangpu to Songjiang, I won’t miss the meager pay, and I won’t miss the weekends spend working on Keynotes and homework. But I will miss all 24 students, enthusiastic and cleverly crazy, each […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
We can improve the way we love when we stop looking at love like a kind of work, the way we may look at careers: how to mold the perfect child, how to have the perfect partner. Modern lovers search for their perfect romance and *the one*. Young girls try to live up to the […]
Kids from rich parents spend their weekends doing extra classes, like maths and English and public speaking, while kids from poorer parents spend their weekends watching videos in the store or restaurant while their parents work. All-day. It’s the same all over the world. Poor people spend more time behind the television, less time with […]
I have this recurring daydream, usually when I’m doing low-focus work like Photoshopping, or like now — sitting in the high-speed way train from Shanghai to Suzhou. It’s this moment from my high school. We need to run three kilometers or some distance like that. Too far to sprint, but close enough to just sort […]
A bit of context: I studied the major advertising from 2010 to 2014 at the Willem de Kooning Academy (WDKA) in Rotterdam, and since 2019 I teach Branding at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art (SIVA). Despite the distance, both schools are actually very similar: The student’s age is the same and they have similar […]
From my childhood, I strongly recall the strange but pleasant smell of our sofa, the engine sound of my mom’s of Citroën AX, and the songs on the radio such as Steve Miller’s ‘The Joker’ and Henk Westbroek’s ‘Zelfs je naam is mooi’. And when I go back to that time, the worries of today […]
I never realized how important idioms, proverbs, and expressions are to language. I never had to. Not only did I always live in a Western culture, also English and Dutch are pretty close to each other. So close in fact, that we often just translate idioms (Rubbing salt in a wound / Zout in wond […]