• Empires of the Word

    Nicholas Ostler has a new book out: The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (2010). In it, he argues that English, today’s global lingua franca, will die out, following the pattern of former great languages Sanskrit and Latin. He…

  • Matisse

    This post was originally written on 11th May, 2010. BBC is currently running a series called “Modern Masters”, presented and narrated by the enthusiastic art journalist Alastair Sooke. The first episode was on Andy Warhol, whose life story, repeated so…

  • Ocean Vuong is a three-time Pushcart nominee

    Congratulations to Ocean Vuong whose poem “Burning House” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Fox Chase Review. This is his third Pushcart nominations (he was nominated two times last year). Born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean is the…

  • ‘Typewriter’

    This post was originally written on 24th March, 2010. This morning, when reading Leonard Wolf’s The Essential Dracula, I learnt a bit more about the universal typing system (the subject of ‘typing’ is brought up as you may know, Mina…

  • Dendrochronology

    Cover art by Shida Cao My short poem “Dendrochronology” is now published in the latest issue (Fall 2010) of Willows Wept Review. The poem was written after a visit to the exhibition “Closer Examinations: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries” earlier this year. As the…

  • Fairytales teach us to be bad?

    This post was originally written on 4th December, 2009. Illustration by Rui Tenreiro Do you know the fairytales “Rumpelsiltskin” and “Clever Gretchen”? They have one thing in common: they teach us to be nasty, cunning and dishonest, if they teach.…

  • The demise of small online publications

    This post was originally written on 7th July, 2009. Part of this post is quoted in the article “Persistent Identifiers: the ‘URN Granular’ Project of the German National Library and the University and State Library Halle” [PDF] My poem “Covers and Spines” was…

  • The real reader should be curious

    This post was originally written on 20th May, 2010 Lorrie Moore Today, Paris Review tweeted a quote by the short-story writer Lorrie Moore: “If one loves stories, then one would naturally love the story of the story.” I agree with…

  • Racism, of course, but what else is going on?

    This post was originally written on 1st September 2010. Reading the Atlantic today, I came across the controversy about Dior’s latest advertising campaign — “Shanghai Dreamers”. Produced by the Chinese artist Quentin Shih, the images show striking white women amidst…

  • Genuine email correspondence

    Pictured: Wheatfield with Crows by Vincent Van Gogh Dear ________,We are very sorry to inform you that we cannot publish your poem “_______” in Cha, after all; we found out that it was previously featured in ______. In our acceptance email,…