Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 82

This week in glasses

Last week we found these vintage sunglasses at a store in Greenbelt. They look like they should be worn while driving to Biarritz in a convertible. We took the frames to our optometrist Nella Sarabia to have the lenses replaced with our own prescription lenses. In Nella’s shop window we saw these Kate Spade frames, […]

The myth of the French Resistance

Thirstily swallowed by a humiliated France, the dominant narrative of the French Resistance was cooked up by General de Gaulle – “Joan of Arc in trousers”, Churchill testily called him – when he addressed the crowds outside the Hôtel de Ville on August 25, 1944. “Paris liberated! Liberated by its own efforts, liberated by its […]

The House of Twenty Thousand Books

Chimen Abramsky, the grandfather of journalist Sasha Abramsky, was an extraordinary polymath and bibliophile who amassed a vast collection of socialist literature and Jewish history. In The House of Twenty Thousand Books, illustrated with the family’s photos, Sasha Abramsky re-creates the lost world of his grandparents, bringing to life the people, the books, and the […]

If Oliver Sacks had taught high school chemistry, we’d have fallen in love with the periodic table

Periodic cake People we wish had been our high school chemistry teachers 1. Oliver Sacks 2. Walter White In 1945 the Science Museum in London reopened (it had been closed for much of the war), and I—a boy of twelve with a passion for metals and numbers—first saw the giant periodic table displayed there. The […]

When I was a monster by Ian McEwan

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Ian McEwan’s first book First Love, Last Rites, the author recalls how he wrote that “scandalous” collection of stories featuring incest, sexual abuse, murder, and a penis in a jar. Other strange voices, other weird or wretched characters, surfaced in that year to haunt or infest my […]

On uncontrollable urges, Oliver Sacks’s last article

Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Detail of a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1510–1511 Walter B., an affable, outgoing man of forty-nine, came to see me in 2006. As a teenager, following a head injury, he had developed epileptic seizures—these first took the form of attacks of déjà vu that might occur dozens of times […]

The Powerbooks shopping bag has our name on it.

Reusable shopping bag at Powerbooks, Php25. We’re sure we said that somewhere, we just don’t know where. It’s a reading advocacy project, we don’t get royalties from sales. Not only is the bag useful, but the color is so bright it’s practically a light source.

Going Clear: How to make tax-free billions in the religion business

L. Ron Hubbard was a prolific science-fiction writer of the 1940s and 50s who wanted more than the dollar per word he was paid for his pulp novels. It occurred to him that the fastest way to gain fame, fortune and power was to start his own religion. This was well within the skill set […]

Chris Evans’s directorial debut is That Thing Called Before Sunrise

The reviews of Chris Evans’s directorial debut Before We Go have been respectful but not enthusiastic. This did not stop us from watching it. Chris Evans also stars in it, so we know that even if it turns out to be terrible, we still have Chris Evans to look at. The good news is that […]

The Movies of My Youth by Italo Calvino

There were years when I went to the movies almost every day, sometimes even twice a day, and they were the years between 1936 and the war, around the time of my adolescence. Those were years in which cinema was my world. It’s been said many times before that cinema is a form of escape, […]