Tomi Ungerer

Tomi Ungerer has just been honored with a long-overdue homage film. I was once very close to seeing him live at an opening of his drawings in Munich, but there was a drunk down in the subway in serious danger of falling off the platform and killing himself who needed saving, so in the end […]

Presenting the speakers at ELTABB

I’ve been volunteering as Events Coordinator for ELTABB e.V., the English Language Teachers’ Association of Berlin-Brandenburg, for the better part of two years now. We have had some wonderful events recently (Andreas Grundtvig, Marjorie Rosenberg). Here’s the line-up of highly respected speakers who will be honoring us with their presence in the coming year: Ian […]

Onion Talks

TED Talks have been one of the best things to hit the Internet: revelatory, accessible, and very useful in popularizing science through storytelling. But now the Onion is parodying them. Ouch.

Flula

Thanks to Flula Borg for deconstructing idioms and also for getting right in there with prejudices against Germans – and just dealing with them. I really like Flula being playful and silly with My Drunk Kitchen presenter Hannah Hart.

Sneaker wars

Sifting through patent wars for the book, I’m looking at Adidas Primeknit vs. Nike Flyknit. The Nike innovation was launched a few months before Adidas stepped up, making it look like Adidas was copying the Nike idea. Adidas was stopped in its tracks by a Nike injunction. That has been reversed. But can Adidas catch […]

Nepenthe

Nepenthe rises above Big Sur, a complex of buildings on the side of the mountain, with a famous restaurant and café. We had blueberries and muffins and coffee that we brought up from a roadside shop that morning, before they opened, and watched the fog lift over the Pacific. Dinner the night before had been […]

Down to you, constant stranger

It’s time for some honest self-help. Writing is extremely authoritative, it’s just the writer out there, and that is truly intimidating. It’s a fear of failure, the nightmare of being defenseless before a group of hostile assessors. I can hear their sneering voices in my dreams, and wake up mumbling “give me a break”. I […]