The blink of an eye
We didn't do 2019. But we're back for 2020. East Edit returns. Bring it.
We didn't do 2019. But we're back for 2020. East Edit returns. Bring it.
Happy New Year, everyone! Guess what? Christmas is over and we don’t have to sing about it anymore. Not that any of the usual suspects mention the word. Instead, there is the decking of halls, jingling of bells and converging of ye faithful. Activities that could happen at any time of the year—and are less [...]
Numbers are tricky. Some are too big to think about—like the ‘googol’ (10 to the power of 100), which has so many digits (101) that storing it in our heads would hypothetically turn our brains into a black hole. Even for fathomable numbers, our brains are hardwired to process them like sensory information. Instinctively, but [...]
Definition: A misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from mishearing the lyrics of a song. The word, ‘mondegreen’ was coined in the 1950s. Writer, Sylvia Wright, described listening to her mother read old poems to her when she was a child. One had the line ‘…and laid him on the green’, which she misheard [...]
Definition: People reaching young adulthood in the early 21st century (there are other unrelated definitions too). But what is ‘young adulthood’? And is the ‘early 21st century’ earlier than 4am? I’m not the only one confused, am I? A dedicated millennial marketing firm says that a ‘millennial’ is anyone born between 1977 and 2000 (gosh, [...]
Oh no, I missed International Happiness Day. Not sure why. I guess I was doing stuff. Being tired. I forgot to stop and think. Anyway, International Happiness Day is March 20. And this year, Denmark is officially the happiest country in the world. Bhutan didn't make the list this year, but it used to be the [...]
Today is Pi Day. You might have come across π at school—π is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, or 3.14159265359… and so on until infinity. Maths hurt my brain—I couldn’t understand numbers at the best of times. And I stopped being able to cope when I encountered equations that had only letters [...]
Nelle Harper Lee died last month at 89. Among the countless obituaries printed for her in the last few days is a tweet by Congressman John Lewis: One of the greatest writers of all time, Harper Lee laid bare the soul of America and her work will continue to educate for generations. She has won [...]
Sometimes, it might seem, contentious political issues are all about terminology. Words that dehumanise. Words that legalise—that is, words that tell people something’s acceptable. Not enough words simply explain. The High Court recently ruled that the government’s offshore detention centre on Nauru is constitutional (PDF, 78KB). Possibly the only good thing about this is that it’s made [...]
The situation was getting desperate. The shelves were bending. The thing looked like this: The geckos had started renting out The Prophet’s dust jacket to a family of huntsmen. No mercy, we said. Only if we’ll read it again. We said. The rest can go into this empty beer carton and we will have pretty [...]