Nancy Hatch Dupree, a former diplomat’s spouse turned guidebook writer, “is opening Afghanistan’s first centre dedicated to the study of its own history and society, picked over for decades by foreign academics but often hard for Afghan scholars to explore in their country.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Google Kills Frommer’s Print Travel Guides
“Following on the news of BBC Worldwide’s sale of Lonely Planet to NC2 Media at a sizable loss, comes the news that Google will cease production and publication of printed guidebooks carrying the Frommer’s brand name. Of course, … as we knew last year: Google only bought Frommer’s for the metadata.”
Why E-Books Are A Different Genre From Dead-Tree Books
“There are two aspects to the e-book that seem … profoundly to alter the relationship between the reader and the text. With the book, the reader’s relationship to the text is private, and the book is continuous over space, time and reader. Neither of these propositions is necessarily the case with the ebook.”
Does French Culture Teach The French To Be Unhappy?
“France, once famous for its joie de vivre, is suffering from existential gloom – and the French have only themselves to blame for their malaise … Research by a French academic … suggests that the country’s citizens are “taught” to be miserable by elements of their own culture.”
Maybe It’s Not That The French Are Unhappy
“It it may well be that the French are only less likely to call themselves happy – and what’s unclear is whether the gloomy or skeptical turns of phrase that they use to describe their states of mind correlate to their actual states of mind. It may be the language of happiness that eludes the French rather than the underlying condition.”
Marcel Duchamp, Chess Master
“He achieved the status of chess master and, with the help of tactician Vitaly Halberstadt, even wrote a book on, yes, endgame strategy. It got a title similar to the names of his gnomic artworks: Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled. Retroactively, at least, his newfound passion conferred a depth and intensity of thought upon all those throwaway Dadaist sculptures.”
Reading Mark Twain’s Fan Mail
“In fact I’m living beyond my time, – because [the doctor] said Oct 15 was my last day ‘on live’ – The only reason I didn’t die on that date was that I wanted to read your latest story in Harpers.”
When Western Contact Transformed Japanese Painting
When Japan re-opened itself to the world in the mid-1800s following two centuries of isolation, “the vast scale of Western inroads and the collapse of traditional patronage that followed the Meiji restoration threw Japanese art into a state of crisis.” One group of painters responded by applying European visual styles to traditional Japanese materials and genres.
Colorful 19th-Century Japanese Woodblock Prints Depict the Fight Against Contagion
The artworks “represent battles with the diseases of cholera and smallpox. As Japan remained largely closed to Western trade until Commodore Matthew Perry forced ports to open in 1854, the woodblocks show how Japanese people’s conception of sickness, health, and medicine changed through early contact with Westerners.”
Lessons In Social Marketing From The Book Of Mormon
“It would be easy merely to dismiss the [very mixed bag of] reviews as an irrelevance, but they were utilised as another consciousness-raising weapon in the Mormon armoury while the real work was being done by Twitter and Facebook missionaries who have been advocating on the show’s behalf for months.”