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門前の小僧習わぬ経を読む。

The environment makes our characters. (Japanese proverb.) A large number of Japanese companies have instituted telecommuting policies over the past few weeks, under the logic that the crowded conditions of commuter trains and enclosed offices are high-risk environments for the transmission of coronavirus. However, with Japanese houses and apartments being decidedly on the small side,…

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Déjà vu, all over again

A brain glitch? A sign of quantum entanglement? What science says about déjà vu. Roughly two-thirds of people have had déjà vu, or the weird feeling that a new situation has been experienced before. Yet its prevalence belies just how mysterious the phenomenon remains to researchers, despite some extraordinary recent leaps in neuroscience. In part,…

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Calling all professionals!

Spin a globe, point your finger, and see where it lands—if only planning a trip were that easy. For those who prefer to take a more rational approach when arranging travel, look to your Myers-Briggs personality type. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a behavioral assessment that calculates how people perceive the world and make…

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Márquez’s magical realist universe

Colombia’s most famous writer, the inimitable Gabriel García Márquez, once said in a press interview that he could never have written his books if he had not been a journalist – because all of his material was extracted from reality. Wandering between the pastel-coloured colonial structures of Cartagena’s labyrinthine cobbled streets, one could be forgiven…

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A brutal refuge?

In the course of the nearly thirty years of his practice, Sir David Adjaye’s projects have been realized on five continents.  Here he reflects on what kinds of homes we build, and how we live in them. They include cultural and historical landmarks—such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C.,…

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