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Our thumb is not green, it is not even chartreuse. But we are an admirer of dahlias and a friend of ours, who is a master dahlia grower, kindly provided us some plant shoots of our own this week. They have distinguished lineages, sort of like a race horse, making us nervous that if we […]
One semester at Willamette University–Harvard, Stanford and Yale alums feel foolish in the presence of Bearcats–we lived in the Canterbury Apartments. It was coincidentally the same semester we were taking Chaucer from one of our favorite professors, Kim Stafford. Kim had a way of pronouncing Middle English so that it was understandable. His voice was […]
We recently stumbled upon the below video of the opening of Saturday Night Live’s first show after September 11th. I hadn’t seen it in years. Context, the context of our times, deeply influences what we see. In 2001, I would not have noticed that every one of the firefighters and police officers surrounding then New York City […]
We traveled to Boston last week which distracted us from making our usual International Need to Know rounds. We arrived on Beantown’s first day of nice weather after a long, cold winter. As our Lyft drove us from the airport to our hotel, taking us by the innumerable universities in the city, it seemed that […]
This week we present one of our periodic China editions–three stories focusing on that wonderful, ever changing, fantastically complicated, increasingly important giant of a country. But before we dive into China, we pause to admire the ever fascinating Japan. We’ve noted more than once that Japan has perhaps the most unique culture in the world […]
Years ago we were traveling overseas, Asia perhaps, though we don’t remember exactly where. We were looking at some postcards, when such communication beasts still existed. We saw one with a naked large man sitting on an enormous turtle. We bought it with the idea of mailing it to two friends who worked in the […]
You may think you did not receive* your regular dose of INTN last week because we had our third knee surgery in three months. But surely you know we are made of sterner stuff than that. No, what prevented delivery of edifying, informative and important international news and data was the continuing technical problems we […]
Back before the current Russian shenanigans, for work we traveled to Russia.* The Russian Far East, to be precise, not too distant from Siberia. In the middle of Winter. It was so cold we were unable to walk outside wearing our then metal-framed glasses because they would stick to our face. But that’s not the […]
In our ever expanding department of unpopular opinions, we finally saw the mega-hit movie Black Panther last week and while entertained, we also had some reservations. The movie was visually stunning, had more interesting moral quandaries and intellectual arguments than your average superhero movie and was overall more entertaining than most Marvel movies. But the […]
Obviously given this newsletter’s content, we have an interest in international. We are indeed keenly interested in our world. How could one not be in this rotating, orbiting globe chock full of so many interesting characters, events and mysteries? And as you’ve probably noticed, we are also a fan of both music and New Orleans […]
