#Spooktober 15: The Dark Power

October 15, 2022

At the end of September, we have taken a look at the monster as a basic plot device: the existence of great evil is revealed to us (and to the hero), and the hero sets off to vanquish it.

Following that trope, we take a look at circular vs. linear patterns and at the different kinds of “Dark Figures”, since we’re in the middle of the Spooky Season, and let’s see what happens when we step out of the metaphor and we don’t have a literal Big Bad Wolf, a literal Witch or a literal Troll to spell it out for us.

books and literature

Snow Country

Sometimes you read a book with beautiful prose and well-constructed characters but, when you put it down, you couldn’t tell the plot if your life depended upon it. Kawabata Yasunari‘s Snow Country is one of these books. Born in 1899, the author won the Nobel

May 3, 2026 9:00 am

books and literature

War and Peace

I’m satisfied.Satisfied and surprised.Satisfied because this book, since reading the Peanuts as a child, is the Ultimate Achievement. Once you’ve read it, you feel you can achieve everything. You could even be the first beagle to land on the moon.And satisfied because… by God, this

May 1, 2026 8:00 am

architecture, engineering and construction

A New Vision for the Learning Crisis

The end of 2024 brought us no grand educational reckoning, no moment of consensus that we need to reimagine how adults learn. Instead, through 2025, we’ve settled into a peculiarly quiet collective exhaustion with the pandemic’s educational experiments, paired with a creeping anxiety that something

April 29, 2026 6:06 am