November, 2011

Introducing a new regular Back in a Bit author, an Aussie expat living in Hanoi…  Tabitha Carvan writes: This, my first post for Crikey comes at a particularly significant time for me in my two-year stint in Hanoi, being as it is only months away from my wedding. My partner Nathan and I are both Australian and [...]

During my first Thanksgiving in the US, I set aside my usual cynicism about retailers using the holidays to boost revenue.

While I didn’t manage to find myself there, Death Valley certainly makes you feel small and realise how violent the creation must be of something so spectacular.

Caroline Regidor writes: ”I’m packing lead in here,” the elderly woman said to the younger one, her face set in a snarl. Gangsta grandma rummaged through her handbag as if she were looking for a gun. She had plopped down next to me. I couldn’t help myself. Curiouser and curiouser, I peered down. All I could [...]

Like many before me, when I finished high school I was eager to escape the rigid conventions of academia and really see the world. Of course at 19 years of age I was hardly Jack Kerouac and instead opted for the very cliché choice of working at a summer camp in the US.

Chasing cheap beer and loose women around the European continent has a long and noble tradition stretching back to the 17th century, when young, aristocratic, mostly British men set off in search of refinement, classic antiquity and plenty of drunken sex. Not much has changed in 350 years.

Freelance writer Grant Doyle writes: The modern day meaning of ‘mongrel’ is somewhat misplaced: etymologically, ‘mong’ means ‘mixture’ while the Old English ‘gemong’ means to ‘mingle’. The contemporary pejorative association comes with the suffix ‘rel’, and shifts the connotative meaning to ‘mixed race’ or ‘person not of pure blood’. Can there be a ‘mongrel’ city? [...]

Living in diverse Brooklyn is like traversing through different worlds and the whole colour spectrum.