Writing is What Happens While You’re Busy Making Other Plans
Making beauty, or deriving pleasure (two expressions of the same thing), where one shouldn’t: that’s what makes the beauty, brings the pleasure. I do my best work when I shouldn’t.
Anything Not Saved Will Be Lost
This kind of place feels almost inevitable, doesn’t it? After all, what could be more natural than this pursuit, than to try and catch memories falling from the sky? We clutch at nostalgia, tie it to technology, let our yearning find purchase on wires and bytes. It doesn’t matter that each piece of data is as mortal as we are.
A struggle to get past the first chapter: Are university students really forgetting how to read?
Universities are supposed to be a bastion of high learning and enlightened thinking; the fact that many people turn up to these respected institutions without the ability to meet lofty challenges suggests something is very wrong with the state of education.
Beyond Gender: Ghulāmiyyāt and Fashion in Abbasid Culture
Studying past cultures presents a unique challenge: understanding how different they were from our own, but in their own right. Take modern-day Syria, Egypt, and Iraq — do their cultures resemble those of the past? It’s a tricky question with no straightforward answers.
Books: Painted, Dressed, Fashioned
This specific minimalist design stands in contrast to the warmth of a jumbled colourful bookcase or library in an English parsonage, where the illustrated covers, each strikingly different, create a charming picture. It belongs to a long tradition in the French literary scene where the books are dressed in uniform, simple covers so the reader will not be attracted to the book only by the visual appeal of the cover.
So, Your Girlfriend’s Superpowers Turned Out to be an Allegory for Autism
She is cold because her powers are ice and rock. She is abrasive because she is superintelligent. This is all well and good. What was not well and good was when she sat you down and said: “I do not actually have magic. I am just autistic.”
