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William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode: 2. The Tête à Tête (1743)After a decade of talking to strangers while traveling, J. R. Patterson explores why strangers make some of the best conversation…
J. R. Patterson
IN 1972 the Irish poet Seamus Heaney drew a line under Northern Ireland, moved south to the Republic, and settled in a cottage in County Wicklow. From his experience…
Parliament building, Victoria, BC; with inner harbor summer activities underway all around IN 1907, NEWLY gilded with the Nobel Prize in Literature, Rudyard Kipling traveled to Canad…
Photo Courtesy of Stanfords, 7 Mercer Walk, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9FA AS A GENERAL RULE rule, I’m happiest in the countryside. The noise, the crush, the speed of cities, even t…
THERE ARE SOME moments in life when, upon entering a room, you realize you have stumbled upon that disturbing border where passion rubs up against obsession. In Baku, Azerbaijan, tha…
“African Renaissance Monument” by pennstatenews is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 LIKE A PILLOW that has burst its seams, Dakar overflows with an excess of life. The resultant drift…
July 20, 2021Photo by slgckgc / Flickr Returning home to Manitoba, J. R. Patterson finds writer Jim Harrison’s meatballs are the comfort food he needs. There’s nothing quite like diving into a good meal…
BOOKSTORES ARE OFTEN pegged as refuges, sanctuaries, havens, and the like, but they behave more accurately like consulates. With their filing systems, scuttling attendants, and all t…
Photo by David Norman / Unsplash A writer with Scottish ancestry traces the life of Scottish Gaelic and assesses the current state of this “intangible heritage” now placed at the center of a cult…
Photo by Artur Kraft / Unsplash GLASGOW IS NOT SO MUCH OF A CITY of books as a city of stories and storytellers. In the years I lived there, the stories I heard reflected the truly w…
Photo by Hussein Alazaat IN THE BONE-CRACKING ARIDITY of Jordan, civilizations are still born from, and borne upon, water. On the poppling wellsprings found on the hills and wadis, t…
Photo: Porto, Portugal by Daniel Seßler GRIPPING THE STEEP BANKS of the Douro like a pile of haphazardly shoveled rocks, the city of Porto feels only one pebble’s slip away from tumb…
April 15, 2024
December 12, 2023
