“God gave the Portuguese a small country as cradle but all the world as their grave” (Camões). The Lusiads is Portugal’s national epic poem, recounting Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India. The author, Luís Vaz de Camões, was related to da Gama through marriage and later traveled to the Portuguese settlements in Goa and Macau, […]
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“These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything” (Tom Nichols). The Death of Expertise was a bit of a dark but fitting way to end 2020. Nichols’ grapples with the increasingly hostile relationship the public shares with experts.
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Ryszard Kapuściński, a Polish journalist, worked as a reporter in Africa and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. He witnessed the numerous transitions of power during these two decades from the fall of European colonial control across Africa to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. In The Soccer War, also known as the Hundred Hours’ War,
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It seems like a lot of people have very intense responses to Rupi Kaur, both positive and negative. I didn’t feel too much about this most recent collection in either direction, but overall, it was an enjoyable, easy afternoon read. Full of platitudes, you really won’t come across much that you haven’t heard before, but
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How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division contains a series of philosophical observations and provides a great framework to consider how we approach one another in each of our different contexts. It’s subtle, personal, and above all else, hopeful. “It is mostly through stories that we learn to think, perceive, feel and remember
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After ten years, I have finally finished paying off my student loans from my bachelor’s degree! I had initially wanted to write a post comparing the German and US education systems. Rather than writing a methodical pro and con list, I recently read Elif Shafak’s powerful little book How to Stay Sane in an Age
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After being murdered, the brain of the protagonist, Tequila Leila, continues to function for 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds. The minutes stretch over the course of the novel, as readers revisit the memories pulled out from the final firings of her synapse. Leila is a sex worker in Istanbul who moves through the city alongside
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Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, tells the story of a young, stay-at-home mother who develops psychosis, largely due to her experiences with everyday sexism. Written in just two months, the novel’s style is straightforward, and the content grapples with sexism that most women can relate to on some level. The name ‘Kim Ji-young’ is considered the
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Absurdistan tells the story of Mishra Vainberg, the son of the 1,238th richest man in Russia. Weighing in at 325 pounds, Mishra a.k.a. “Snack Daddy” blunders around St. Petersburg with his gaggle of equally outrageous friends before traveling to Absurdistan. Much of the humor is highly self-aware and dark, often bordering on the obscene. A
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Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy is first and foremost a coming-of-age narrative that tells the story of Arjie, a young boy who grapples with his homosexuality and Tamil ethnicity. The novel is set on the cusp of the thirty-year Sri Lankan Civil War and contains events suggestive of the infamous historical incidents that led to the
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