Culture in the Blender

Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells in a wonderful story why only knowing one story of someone is nearly always one-dimensional and omits important information.

I am planning a cocktail party. My guest list has people of four ethnicity categories from four continents. I’d have an even more varied guest list if distance wasn’t a factor.

I apologize for not writing in an eternity or two – I am trying to conduct lots of experiments, write papers, and look for jobs at the same time. Needless to say, I have now broken my immune system and got sick.
Many interesting things have happened since I last blogged – like Russia’s imperialism rearing [...]

A friend of mine sent me a link to an opinion article in the New York Times by David Brooks on the effect of the cognitive revolution on discussions about religion. He argues that the materialist-religious debates about the existence of God will be replaced by debates in which scientists whose spiritual beliefs overlap somewhat with Buddhism who challenge [...]

I’m back in Hotelland. I’m at a conference and staying at the conference hotel, the San Fransisco Marriott. (In line with being a typical TCK, I am becoming highly educated by getting a PhD in materials science and engineering.) Last night, I sat in the bar on the top floor looking out at the San [...]

An older Racialicious post made me think of the attitude I’ve seen both online and in real life from some Americans, who seem to think it’s endlessly cool to be Japanese. I’m not really sure where this meme comes from. Americans are very patriotic, so what makes a subset of probably the most patriotic people [...]

I attended a latin jazz concert last Friday. It was very comforting. Brazilian (and by association, other latin-inspired) music feels familiar and comfortable, even though I’ve never been to Brazil. When I was a baby, my father was working on a big project in Brazil and bought Brazilian music there. When I had trouble sleeping, [...]

给大家新年快乐!

春节快乐!

Happy Spring Festival!

The two classes I’m auditing intersected in an interesting way recently. In Judy Wajcman’s book Feminism Confronts Technology, there is a chapter on technology as masculine culture. One of the subsections is on engineering. Wajcman argues that
“central to the social construction of the engineer is the polarity between science and sensuality, the hard and the [...]

I imagine that most readers of this blog would be interested in FlightBliss, a blog all about how to wrangle your way into Business or First for as little money as possible. How useful is that?