Microsoft bought Nokia for $7.2 billion and Skype for $8.5 billion. Google spent on $3.2 billion on Nest and $12.5 billion on Motorola. Facebook splashed $1 billion on Instagram, $2 billion on Oculus and $19 billion on Whatsapp.  Brands like Starbucks, Red Bull and Oreo have well beyond 35 million followers on Facebook each, a […]

Animal Farm-eqsue, the book tells about the little savage society on a deserted island, now occupied by boys. Golding captures the human inability for peace strikingly well. If this is youth fiction, it’s at the far end of it, but it explores human nature so well, the desert island being a metaphor for an experiment […]

Yesterday was the warmest 8th March ever in the Netherlands, and today the temperature rose even further. Fluctuation happens every year, but thirteen of the fourteen warmest years on record have all occurred in the 21st century, and we’re only fourteen years in. If you want to show your ignorance, there’s no better way to […]

Originally posted on Quora, in an answer to Does anyone else in their 30/40s still have the hope of becoming a big shot in the future? Dreams come without an expiry date, and you should never accept the notion that you can’t do what you’d like to do. Here are some examples of people who didn’t. Sylvester […]

Here’s a close-up of the newspaper I found in an antique shop in Leiden. It’s from the Tenth of January, 1840, and printed with movable type, so you can really feel the words pressed into the paper. A lot of manual labour was put into making this newspaper, without all the eases of publishing we […]

India’s population of more than 1.2 billion people speaks a few hundred different languages. 112 of those languages are spoken by more than 10,000 people, and 30 languages in India have over a million speakers. Then, just take in consideration that more than a quarter of the population is illiterate. So, if you’re an advertising […]

Ideally, a novel is just one idea long. Which is also the perfect length for movies, dinners, albums, advertising campaigns and blogs. Anything. And the perfect chapter, scene, dish, song, advertisement or post, is one idea as well. On a smaller scale; the perfect sentence adds one idea to the paragraph. In its turn, the paragraph […]

‘Natural’ on the left, vs ‘Beneficial’ on the right.

As sad at the passing of Paul Walker and Roger Rodas is, I’d like to use this as an opportunity for sense. People who drive like idiots on public roads cause pain and  suffering. Both Paul Walker and Roger Rodas leave behind a wife and kids. I’m glad they didn’t take any innocent bystanders with […]

I love reading. When a percipient writer penned down his words with perfection, I love reading. Writing in its good form is thinking on paper, and speaks directly to me in beautiful words. I love that. I love it when I read intelligence, expressed in a clear, simple, brief and human way. Reading good writing […]