integration

Signed up for another month at my language school. My teacher said he thought I could skip two months and move on to the preparation course ...

testing testing

I have a couple of books on the TestDAF, a test of German proficiency for foreign students who want to study at a German university. I thou...

less clueless than commonly supposed

The FT has a little Flash movie explaining monolines, how they work and why they matter, here . Good news. (For all of you who've been...

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Another Country, the English-language bookshop in Kreuzberg, will be showing Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz (with English subtitles)...

the examination mafia

I went up to Lichtenberg last week to register for the TestDAF, the Test für Deutsch als Fremdsprache, which most universities accept as pro...

Our Man in Port Moresby

My co-author Ilya Gridneff is now in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, having taken up the position of correspondent for the Australian Associ...

intuition

A reader writes that he thinks a self-explanatory interface is a goal (perhaps unattainable). I'm not sure that it actually is a goal, ...

I know that Aha! moment

I felt a warm rush of gratitude to the speaker, a bespectacled doctor. It made no difference that he was Ayman al-Zawahri , Al Qaeda ’s No. ...

17:59

1. The Serenity Prayer as used in AA: God, grant me the patience to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change those I can, a...

marginal utility

I had a bad habit. I would get up, check e-mails; next thing I knew, several hours of surfing would have gone by. As 2007 wound down, I work...

In brief

A reader has sent me a link to his review of The Last Samurai on amagnificentbastard , which includes a fuller discussion of ethical questio...