04
Dec
A dean, a sociologist and an economist read Goodnight Moon for The Harvard Crimson’s Fifteen Minutes magazine. (This year they have Steven Pinker doing If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.)
17
Nov
You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people’s privacy - being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveller is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveller’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveller’s worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveller.
Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
30
Sep
At the market in old Damascus, you can’t miss the stores tucked between dishdash-peddlers and ice cream parlors. They are Victoria’s Secret gone to the circus: tweeting-bird bikinis, vibrating cell phone thongs, blooming pasties. I was reminded of the goods after stumbling upon a book released last fall, Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie.
Damascus’ enthusiasm for lingerie is no surprise; Syria is known for its elaborate belly-dance costumes festooned with sequins and tassels. But the g-strings hawked by men - and it’s always men who sell them - hardly match the shariah laws commonly enforced, as the Big Think notes. Even the language doesn’t accommodate it: the first word on the Arabic sign above is “lingerie,” phoneticized.
