I was in Dusseldorf airport last week and I overheard two American travelers share their experience of learning German in Germany. Eventually they landed on the language’s case and gender system. Morphology always makes a good conversation topic. “I would understand if there was any logic to it. …

Western culture is one of most hybrid of all modern cultures. At its root, a mix of ancient Greek tragedy, Roman pragmatism, Jewish narrativism, Christian messianism, Germanic heroism, Celtic supernaturalism, Northern European puritanism, English constitutionalism, German idealism, French revolutionism, Italian non-me-ne-fottoism. The list goes on. …

Our post-industrial cultures have been shaping and exploring various patterns of trivialisation. Trivialisation of friendship. Trivialisation of worth. Trivialisation of sacredness. Of heroism. Of freedom and liberation. Of authority. Of government and citizenship. Of living and dreaming. At the heart of these patterns, there is a strong urge for simulacra…

No matter how much you exercise, how healthy you eat and how carefully you plan, death comes to us all. Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. It’s the same with words. Language evolved every which way before the advent of Academies, and it continues to do so afterwards…

To think that as one moves across the board, things don’t get lost is quite unrealistic. Something always gets lost, pieces get captured. the question is: what’s the trade-off? Has the strategy worked? Has the outcome been achieved? There is always a cost. …

I was not an early reader nor, once reading became a feature of my mental landscape, an avid one. As a child, I loved being read to, and I dazzled the adults around me with my capacious memory and ability to recite thousands of lines of poetry. But by the…

Past performance is no guarantee of future outcomes. An increase in quantity won’t lead to a surge a quality. More is not necessarily better, and good yesterday doesn’t mean better today. …

It’s not a coincidence that the first European novel is also one of the weirdest pieces of literature. Petronius’ Satyricon, a work of the 1st century AD, features gay threesomes, warewolves, twisted dinner parties, leather sex toys and cannibalism. It is a monument built on and around irony, but it…

There is a time to innovate and a time to fall back on the certainties of past achievements. As many of us are moving fast and breaking things, and others wall off golden ages to be recovered and restored, it’s quite useful to look back at an age, perhaps the…