New Photobook

This is my latest photo diary, describing a truly memorable 12-day trip through the Republic of Georgia, a small country that is fast turning into a go-to travel destination.
Preview at blurb.com

In my humble opinion, the book looks particularly good on an iPad or other Mac device. Get it here: iBooks edition

Word of the Month: Die Kulturbrille

Word of the Month: Index I'm reading Helen Macdonald's book Falcon, where she introduces, on the first page of the introduction, our current Word of the Month. It is a term coined by German-born Franz Boas (1858-1942), who is considered the father of American anthropology (pictured at right). The word has two compounds: Kultur ("culture") and Brille ("glasses" or "spectacles"). In Macdonald's words, it's "the invisible mental lens your own culture gives you through which you view the world". The author describes in subsequent chapters how our very human Kulturbrille makes falcons the "repository for human meanings". For Boas, it was important for anthropologists to become aware of their Kulturbrille to prevent them from making biased judgments about the alien cultures they encountered and tried to understand. The same is important for people like us, who increasingly live in a multi-cultural environment. I like the present term because it captures an abstract concept through a very concrete image, a characteristic it shares with other words of the month I have introduced.

FIFA World Cup 2018

Continuing a tradition I started many years ago, I'm creating again a post that allows the soccer fans among my friends to share thoughts about the tournament as it unfolds. The difference this time is that for health reasons, I cannot travel to Germany to watch the matches with my brothers. I have to find ways to do this here, which may mean that I cannot watch every match I want to see.

A few initial remarks. This Cup promises to be really exciting because there is no clear-cut favorite. In 2014, Brazil was expected to win. Especially the Brazilians themselves seemed to be believe that, which made their historic 1:7 loss to Germany in the semi-finals the more devastating. This time, they are again one of the favorites, and for much more legitimate reasons. But France, Spain, and Germany also have strong teams, and the English, Portuguese, and Belgians should not be counted out. All of this looks very promising.

Postscript: And it was an exciting Cup, which will go down in history as the Cup of Surprises. Upsets seemed to be the rule, not the exception, although the (well-deserved) winner, France, was not one of them. But Croatia made it to the final!