Month: December 2020
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Best of 2020
I reflected on the year using Pat Kua’s End of Year Retrospective Template. I won’t share all my results here, just a bit of a roundup below, but the questions from that document I really appreciated were: What brought you joy this year? What made you sad this year? What are you grateful for this…
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New writing elsewhere, by me
The latest edition of the quarterly Kyoto Journal just dropped with a new article by yours truly. travel, revisited is KJ’s 99th issue. The magazine has long been a staple in the English language media on Japan. I was asked to consider the topic of travel writing as it pertains to my book project. While…
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From the Ruins of Empire — a review
Books On Asia asked reviewers to pick their top books for 2020. I submitted my four along with the other contributors and gave a short comment. Below is a more fleshed out review. For more reviews, check out booksonasia.net Pankaj Mishra delivers a sweeping account of the intellectual history of anti-colonial thought in the early…
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The nearly 400 year legacy of a cutting edge ceramic coffee filter
This NY Times piece on a 1,020 year old shop in Kyoto has been making the rounds online. It got me thinking about other examples of products or skills that have traversed centuries, and a random discovery we made at a shopping stall: a paperless ceramic coffee filter. Last October we travelled to Imari and…