by Nigel Scotchmer | Humor
Nigel explains how the Roman precursor to our modern toilet brush, the xylospongium, gave us our grilled meat on a stick, our modern kebabs…and then he concludes with an original Parthian recipe. The other day, while fulminating on the algorithmic vacuity of Facebook,...
by Nigel Scotchmer | Essays
Nigel writes an encomium for the Cost of Glory… Twenty minutes on the rowing machine and the display will dutifully say I have rowed 3.7 kilometres. But that is not really where I am. In my mind, memories merge. I am rowing from Miletus on the Maeander to...
by Nigel Scotchmer | Essays
Nigel writes on the irony of hindsight, and how looking back is the only way we ever really learn. “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.” – George Eliot, Middlemarch It is a long drive to Ottawa, and one that I...
by Nigel Scotchmer | Essays
Irony and the human condition: Peter Scotchmer on why double vision matters more than ever. “…the ironist is caught in a boundary zone between two opposed and mutually exclusive perspectives… between the necessity to believe in the world as it ought to be, and the...
by Nigel Scotchmer | Essays
Irony, #1 – Hannah Arendt, the Refugee from Königsberg – Nigel writes about a stateless thinker who made irony her weapon against totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture Königsberg was a jewel on the coast of the Baltic....
