The Golden Age of Bookstores
Back in the 1990s, a lot of book lovers bemoaned the death of the small, independent bookseller. They thought of the big chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble as the enemy. This was...
Odd Punctuation Marks
Punctuation marks are a fairly modern phenomenon. From antiquity up through the Middle Ages, words were written together in great long strings, with little spacing or punctuation. These kind of texts were meant to...
The Beauty of Barcelona’s Eixample
Barcelona is a beautiful city at any scale. Take a walk down La Rambla or visit the Sagrada Familia and you’ll see some of the greatest urban spaces in the world. Then take a...
The Rise and Fall of Neutral Moresnet
Borders can cause a lot of problems. I’ve already talked about how shifting rivers can create odd little enclaves on the landscape. But borders can be tricky even when there aren’t rivers involved. This...
The Corporate Provinces of Canada
Ever since I published “The Corporate States of America”, my Canadian readers have been asking for one of their country. So after many months of delay, I give you “The Corporate Provinces of Canada”....
Homage to Catalan
If you’ve ever been to Barcelona, you might know that they don’t speak Spanish. It comes as a shock to many first-time tourists, but the language spoken in Barcelona isn’t Spanish. It’s Catalan. I’ve...
The Corporate States Map: A Follow-Up
A couple of weeks ago, my map of “The Corporate States of America” went viral. My email started blowing up, and the number of visitors to my blog soared exponentially. I was pleased as...
Sharknado vs Shark NATO
The Syfy Channel makes a lot of low-budget movies involving monsters and natural disasters. Their latest monstrosity is a movie called “Sharknado”. As the title implies, it is all about tornadoes full of man-eating...
When In Doubt, Reboot
Some folks just “get” computers and some folks don’t. I’m not entirely sure why that’s the case. To some extent, it seems to be a function of age, but that’s far from universal. I...
