Archive for the 'Cultural miscellany' Category
A great new study was recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology about the relationship between living abroad and creativity. There’s now abundant evidence to add to what generations of expats have known all along: living in a foreign environment, or in a multicultural experience, mitigates creativity. Interestingly, this increased creativity doesn’t [...]
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Tags: abroad, creativity, Language, psychology, travel
On my trip Bogotá last month, I brought some heavy duty reading material with me demonstrating my general lack of ambition regarding the Spanish language: Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal. “Are you going to review that?” I was asked, jokingly, as though anyone in the Spanish-speaking world had to be told about Harry Potter. [...]
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Tags: Germany, pop culture, television, The Office, translation, tv
Why I love to travel: part two
“One of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy.” -Sir Richard Burton
After spending several consecutive [...]
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Tags: colombia, mompox, travel, vacation
As a part of my ongoing, seemingly never-ending book proposal, I was doing more research today on tourism. (Sometimes “research” can mean “reading your email.”)
According to the esteemed Travel Agent Central, “Mental Health Tourism could be the new niche.” As Mark Rogers writes:
The Bangkok Post is reporting on the contents of a paper presented by [...]
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Tags: computers, economy, gas, gas prices, health, mental health, tourism, travel, trend, trends
I did an article on music recommendation a while back, and have been reading a lot about the subject lately for another article. One thing that always bothered me about looking at someone’s listening history–a list of songs they’ve listened to, and how many times they’ve listed to each one–is that you have no idea [...]
Filed under: Cultural miscellany, Technology | 1 Comment
Tags: visualization
I decided to work a little bit on my book proposal today, which is going to look at vacation and traveling and every day life sorts of things. It’s based partly on an article I wrote for an upcoming issue of Budget Travel. In researching a bit, I read this ridiculous article today in Forbes, [...]
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Tags: authentic, authenticity, industry, tourism, travel, vacation
Salvador Dali on a game show
In the first installment of “Cultural Miscellany,” I present a true work of surrealism:
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Tags: game show, reality TV, Salvador Dali, surrealism, video
About seven years ago, a friend of mine whose brother was a producer at a cable news channel told me about one of the jobs they had interns do: prepare footage of celebrity obituaries before the celebrities had actually died. Older and more important celebrities got priority. (He noted that there were, oddly, no preparations [...]
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Photo credit: Fran Lebowitz.I like to write about behavior, culture, and technology.
