May 2012
38 posts
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“When, as travelers, we photograph a sight that is famous from having been...”
– Tourist Snapshots, Rolf Potts
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“Host cultures know that taking pictures is a tourist compulsion. When I visited...”
– Tourist Snapshots, Rolf Potts
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Tourist Snapshots →
longformblog:
“I turned to see Eva padding around the room, naked, dipping a small plastic wand into the bottle of bubble soap she’d bought at the market… Sometime in the far future, when I was lying on my deathbed, I said, this was the moment I wanted to remember.”
On the relationship between travel and photography.
Rolf Potts | Design Observer | May 2012
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“Twenty-three years ago, Bo Yibo, the father of fallen Party star Bo Xilai, was...”
– Is China finally confronting its dark history?, by Mark MacKinnon
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“Two hundred metres away, facing the Marine trenches, there was an N.V.A. sniper...”
– Dispatches, Michael Herr
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“I love command since it is the ideal welding of freedom and slavery. You can be...”
– Ernest Hemingway, True at First Light
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The Capital, Reincarnated →
I didn’t ever feel I could write about Bangkok. I was safe describing the water fights of Songkran or the Chinese immigrants on Yaowarat Road, because they were discrete places or occasions, isolated from my days in wider Bangkok, which I spent hopping on and off sky trains and river boats and taxis, looking for a coherent narrative. I started to think of the city like a badly edited compendium....
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“Many Americans consider them to be nomadic, but the war has had more to do with...”
– Dispatches, by Michael Herr
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Amandla with no Ngawethu →
“I don’t understand the English language and I don’t understand what all these words mean. But I do understand that this law will take us back to apartheid because you want to give the chiefs too much power,” he said.
“This law will make us suffer because it wants to put HF Verwoerd’s regime back in place … by putting the indunas back in control of our lives.”
He handed back the...
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“Few toreros excel in all three departments. Some, like young Chicuelo, are...”
– Ernest Hemingway, 1923: Bullfighting is Not a Sport – It is a Tragedy
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The Devil’s Air Conditioner and Other Tales of Woe →
“Sometimes life in Beijing is like one of those Japanese game shows where they see how much torture people are willing to endure for surprisingly mediocre prizes.”
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“Bangkok’s original ceremonial name in Thai is…listed in the Guinness Book of...”
– Bangkok Days, Lawrence Osborne
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"A century and a half after its wanton... →
…French infantry, Englishmen, unmounted cavalry, artillery men, Queens dragoons, Sikhs, Arabs, Chinese coolies… this ant-heap of men of every color, of every race, this entanglement of individuals from every nation on the earth, swarm[ed] on this mound of riches, hurrahing in all the languages of the globe, hurrying, struggling, stumbling, falling, picking themselves up, swearing, cursing,...
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“India’s services-based growth spurt may have run much of its course. Call...”
– Tyler Cowen, Never Mind Europe. Worry About India.
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EM Forster's prophetic short story THE MACHINE... →
“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”
“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn”t say anything against the Machine.”
“Why not?”
“One mustn’t.”
“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other....
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How Gandhi made tea taboo: A history of tea... →
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“This country which he hated was now his native country, his home. He had lived...”
– From Burmese Days, by George Orwell
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“There came a time, he realised, when the strangeness of everything made it...”
– From Lost Horizon, by James Hilton
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China’s Forgotten Army →
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