Culture Archives

Arts & Culture

Generation Y at Work #4: What’s Your Dream Job?

Growing up, our parents told us, “You can do anything you want to do.” As a consequence, which we’ve either learned from them or have ...

by Marjon Huizing | May 16, 2012June 4, 2013
Arts & Culture

Generation Y at Work #3: WhY? (Part II)

If we believe developmental psychologists (and why shouldn’t we), the events we see and experience in our early adolescent years shape us for the rest ...

by Marjon Huizing | May 9, 2012June 4, 2013
Arts & Culture

Notes on the British pub

I love a good country pub. My husband and I will drive for ages on a two-lane road that looks suspiciously one-way, the hedges scraping ...

by Shannon Evans | May 9, 2012June 4, 2013
Arts & Culture

Generation Y at Work #2: WhY? (Part I)

A while ago, I had a discussion with another Gen Y-er about the significance of different generations in the workforce. He claimed that everybody is ...

by Marjon Huizing | May 5, 2012June 4, 2013
Arts & Culture

Generation Y at Work #1: 30… and now what?

You may have been amused when your father had a midlife crisis – when he bought a leather jacket, started riding a motorbike and dating ...

by Marjon Huizing | May 2, 2012June 4, 2013
Arts & Culture

The Psychology of Tea

Touring a standard British kitchen, I open a cabinet and find rows of mugs, like ceramic soldiers ready for the next guest invasion. There’s a ...

by Shannon Evans | May 1, 2012June 4, 2013
Arts & Culture

The True Meaning of Children’s Day

It was really Noel Rosa who convinced me to go. If I’m trying to decide where to go out and Dama do Cabaré comes up in ...

by Litro | April 23, 2012June 2, 2013
Arts & Culture

A Thirty-year-old Kiss

I started as a research assistant at the Instituto Moreira Salles back in June. I’d been thinking about it ever since they told me it ...

by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux | April 18, 2012June 2, 2013
Arts & Culture

Searching for Carmen

A concrete building, too small to be a UFO but too big to be a public bathroom, in a dusty, abandoned playground between two highways. ...

by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux | April 9, 2012June 2, 2013
Arts & Culture

Stuck in Traffic

Stuck na hora do rush: Centro, 18:30. Bus crawling down Rio Branco so slowly you begin to suspect that the driver has just let his ...

by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux | April 2, 2012June 2, 2013
Arts & Culture

The Stripy Jumper

A bit about me: I now live in the UK. I married the British guy, put my entire life into suitcases, got an Oyster card, ...

by Shannon Evans | March 30, 2012June 4, 2013
Arts & Culture

Small Talk

One thing that continues to startle me (and when I say “startle”, I mean it caused me to delicately raise an eyebrow) is the Brazilian ...

by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux | March 26, 2012June 2, 2013
Arts & Culture

The Greek and the Fairy

I’ll just fess up now. On Friday, that was me. If you happened to be an upright carioca commuter on your way to Glória that ...

by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux | March 21, 2012June 2, 2013
Arts & Culture

Why Are We Pushing Again?

Carnaval is no joke if you’re a lone girl. At first I dodged the grabbing and the “Oi, gatas” and everything else, but things got ...

by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux | March 20, 2012June 2, 2013
Arts & Culture

Carnaval with Training Wheels

I may end up loving Carnaval in spite of itself, and for perhaps predictable reasons. This was, I can say with confidence, the first time ...

by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux | March 5, 2012June 2, 2013
Arts & Culture

Feature Film: The Woman in Black

While many horror writers imagine ghosts along distinctly sympathetic Freudian lines—there’s something in their past that’s making them behave in such wicked ways, and if ...

by Robin Stevens | February 24, 2012June 4, 2013
Arts & Culture

Play: Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer

Written in the eighteenth century by Oliver Goldsmith, it’s the story of upper-class twit Marlowe, a man who’s spent all his life being educated and ...

by Robin Stevens | February 3, 2012June 4, 2013
Arts & Culture

The New Literary Dissertation

As I write this, there’s many a final year English student in a library in every university town, panicking about their upcoming dissertations. For many ...

by Briony Wickes | January 27, 2012May 1, 2013
Arts & Culture

Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar

In the first scene of The Pitmen Painters, set in the coal-mining town of Ashington in the 1930s, a group of miners have organised an ...

by Robin Stevens | January 22, 2012May 1, 2013
Arts & Culture

Eating Blind at Dans Le Noir

Can eating the dark be more poetical than dining by candlelight? Still arousing people’s curiosity today, Dans le noir (French for in the dark) is ...

by Litro | January 6, 2012May 1, 2013