Osaka
Osaka is Japan's second largest city. It has an entirely different atmosphere than Tokyo.
Koyasan
Koyasan or Mount Koya is the site of a large temple settlement near Osaka. One of the highlights is the Okuno-in, a wonderful, mysterious forest lined with giant cedar trees and over 200,000 tombstones and Buddhist memorials.
Naoshima
Photography is not allowed at the various pavilions and museums at Naoshima. The island itself is quite nice as well though.
Van Gogh and Japan
An excellent exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam highlights the influence of Japanese art on Van Gogh.
Further Reading
Slavoj Zizek reviews Blade Runner 2049. The "Humpty Dumpty" particle. Artists with a day job. The role of luck in life success. 7 years after Fukushima. AI is grappling with a replication crisis. Geert Lovink on distraction and its discontents. Interviews with Jean Tirole and Bruno Latour. And more.
Highlights from the Fall 2018 Ready-to-Wear Collections
A selection of outfits from the Fall 2018 RTW collections that caught my eye.
Further Reading
Are most real world complex networks are scale-free? No longer writing, Philip Roth still has plenty to say. Why paper jams persist. Is the era of quantum computing here? Inside the Amazon's deforestation crisis. Three recent books about science's inference problem. Rongorongo. And more.
Blade Runner 2049
"Blade Runner 2049" is quite simply an awesome movie. The cinematography is absolutely amazing.
Further Reading
Every memory leaves its own imprint in the brain. Classifying all possible phases of matter. What makes a perfect croissant. Why an old theory of everything is gaining new life. Thomas Kuhn’s revolutionary ideas. Is evolutionary science due for an overhaul? What Unicode will make possible. And more.
Further Reading
A story by Ali Smith. Why write fiction in 2017? Clemens Setz visits the Netherlands. The last remaining speaker of Taushiro. Goethe. What bullets do to bodies. A history of humans trying and failing to understand the minds of apes. The correspondence of Descartes and Elisabeth of Bohemia. And more.
The Best Books of 2017
The best books I read in 2017 in various categories: best fiction, best science, best economics, best book about the USA, most useful, most eye-opening.
Further Reading
Corina Tarnita deciphers patterns in soil created by competing life-forms. How memories form and recall works. Inequality in nature and society. A literary tour of the U.S. Žižek on ideology as the original augmented reality. Workforce implications of machine learning. Books about bread. And more.