Redesign

I started this blog in 2012. Fourteen years later, there are more than 400 posts and 250,000 words, enough for 2-3 books on here. During all that time, I resisted the temptation to redesign the page or do any other major tech improvement to my online persona. AI has changed that to some extent. While I don’t use AI for any of my writing on the blog, it does help wonders with the coding and design tweaking.

Among the major changes are a static byline at the top, welcoming new readers. Most of the traffic to this page comes from search engines (for how long, one has to wonder, in an age of increasingly reductive intra-chatbot research?). The people who click on the home link can now find clear information on where they have landed. I have also started putting together some curated posts summarizing the content on this blog in a more orderly, thematic way. There are now also photos on the right, encouraging me to pick up my old camera and go out to document the world around me visually. A better category and date archive makes navigating the page easier, especially for myself when I’m looking for something.

More than anything, this little redesign is a commitment to keep writing in this space even as new and exciting other opportunities come around. I cannot overemphasize the stability and grounding this blog has given me over the years. The next birthday post is due next year (see here for the 2017 and 2022 editions). I hope I have some exciting new stuff to report and to thank this public notepad for then.

Opening a bookshop manifesto

With a move to a new but yet undisclosed location coming up later this year, I am entertaining options for my next life chapter. Looking back at my intellectual and professional journey over the past two decades, and taking into account the state of the world today, I concluded that I want to start something of my own. Could a bookshop be the answer?

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Happy new year

I am glad to have had a relatively productive 2025 on this blog, having penned 24 posts in total, ranging from substantial to travelogue. After I struggled to maintain momentum on this blog for some years (coinciding with more professional demands and a backlog of PhD-related writing), I hope to continue in this fashion in 2026.

There are some ideas already. I don’t want to call them resolutions, as they might fall by the wayside organically, but maybe they can act as a reminder whenever I feel I don’t have anything to do.

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Adlergestell

I picked up Adlergestell by Laura Laabs and finished it in just a few sittings — it drew me in more than I expected. Laura and I haven’t seen each other in about twenty years, but we were friends in high school and travelled through Kyrgyzstan together in 2004. Reading her debut novel felt a bit like revisiting that time — not only because of her voice, but because the story hits close to home in more ways than one.

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Happy Unequal Unity Day

A few weeks ago, I clicked on a Spotify suggested audiobook on East-West relations, and for lack of anything else to listen to, I started Steffen Mau’s “Ungleich Vereint: Warum der Osten Anders Bleibt”. It took only a few concentrated sittings. Since then, I have been immersing myself in several other books on the topic, and am hoping to pen a multi-book review with some autobiographical vignettes in the weeks or months to come.

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European travels

We went back to Europe for the first time in two years, and really for the first time since COVID. We made stops in Germany (countryside, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden and Leipzig), London and Rotterdam. Not counting the two COVID sojourns in 2020 and 2021, we last lived in Europe in 2012. The distance–mental and physical–is clearly having an effect on how I perceive this part of the world, my “home”, or is it? It was a blast to be back. Some memories and observations for the record.

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Memory and space

For the walker in Tokyo, the unexpected is always waiting (Jinnai Hidenobu)

Craig Mod is a publisher / artist / entrepreneur and flaneur whose newsletters I follow. He is based in Tokyo and accompanies his regular dispatches with great photography in which he captures details of the Japanese capital that are sometimes hard to describe in words.

His most recent “pop up” mailing list was a weeklong walking tour through the Tokyo of his memories. I was reminded of some of the academic stuff I have been teaching my students at Temple about space and memory, but also of my own time in the city.

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Blast from the past

My friend Rob has dug up some old cassettes, yes, tapes, from the mid-1990s when we all made electronic music using a variety of now arcane-seeming tools. My weapon of choice was “FastTracker II”, a software sequencer used primarily by amateur techno and hardcore producers at the time. It only required a PC running MS-DOS and a reasonable sound card. They were quite simple to use, but required some manual tricks and hacks to push their boundaries and sound effects. It seemed like an eternity before digital audio workstations became available to everyone. (Here is a great summary of the technology and the now-distant culture surrounding it.)

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Youthful idealism

Browsing through the deep archives of the web, I rediscovered some of my own writings from many years ago. One of the posts on my old weblog in particular caught me eye. It’s 17 years old, and about the concept of “Eurasianism”, one of Putin’s ideological foundations in his dangerously hodge-podge worldview.

I’m not going to comment on this from today’s point of view and whether or not it (still) is as relevant as some people make it out to be. But still, I couldn’t resist posting this. I wrote this entry in response to a former blogging buddy visiting a SAIS seminar featuring Aleksandr Dugin (!). I wish my analysis had turned out right, but my youthful self seems to have been engaged in some wishful thinking. Continue reading