I must apologise, time is indeed relative; and my experience of “soon” may not exactly accord with the experience of others. After some gentle prodding on Twitter for the second part, here it is, finally. In my last post I discussed whether freely sharing skills and knowledge, as encouraged by Impossible.com, is something that South…
Part one of a three-part series on gift economies. I was very interested to learn recently of British model Lily Cole’s, new online venture: Impossible.com. It hasn’t yet launched but from what I can gather it’s an experimental foray into constructing a micro “gift economy”, which will use social media to encourage people to interact…
I recently watched Werner Herzog’s latest documentary feature Into the Abyss. The film examines the morality of capital punishment through the prism of a triple murder that took place in Montgomery County, Texas in 2001. Herzog dedicates a large portion of the film to recreating the grisly sequence of events that led to the murder…
The Globe to Globe Festival is currently taking place at London’s Globe Theatre. Thirty-seven theatre companies from all around the world will each perform pieces from the Bard’s complete canon, in their native languages. These include Venus and Adonis in six South African languages; The Merchant of Venice in Hebrew; Macbeth in Polish; and Love’s…
“OMG! EPIC!!!” For anyone who regularly frequents online spaces, this is a familiar refrain. It is the default comment for even the most pedestrian or banal of content. So much so, that the word itself has taken on the same nature of the objects or events it is so undeservedly used to describe. Type “epic” into…
I am no longer sure where I fit upon the political spectrum anymore. I wish I could be as righteously anarchic as some of my Libertarian friends, but I like the rule of law too much. I am also known to display certain hippyish tendencies that preclude the possibility of ever being seriously considered a…
Having not grown up under apartheid I’ve never had the misfortune of opening my morning newspaper to find blacked out and missing articles, thankfully I’ve only had to rely on the unfortunate anecdotes of those who did. If all goes to plan, however, it seems I too am to be treated to a similarly grotesque…
On a recent trip to England, while sitting on a train en route from London to the north where my mother, and hundreds of years of ancestry are, I lapsed into my usual reverie, staring out the window for the entire duration of the journey, books and laptops and other distractions soon forgotten watching the…
On July 13 1793 the assassin Marie-Anne Charlotte De Corday d’Armont entered the private rooms of Paris-dwelling Jean-Paul Marat, “L’Ami du peuple[1]“, revolutionary, Jacobin and soon: dead. The much-feared one greeted her from his reclining position in the bath, the treated water soothing his blistered, itchy skin no other place offering suitable respite from the…
So recently I got to thinking about “altruism” … What left George Price utterly despondent and suicidal, Ayn Rand called self-esteem. While the former spent much of his later life trying desperately to prove that human beings were capable of truly selfless acts, the latter spent her entire literary career rejecting such notions outright and…
