Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave,’ Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative, Hegel’s metaphysics — these are a few of the things one studies in philosophy. Much of philosophy, including these topics, remain remote and abstracted from the realities of everyday life. Sure Plato, Kant, and Hegel were intellectual giants. But they are…

Interior design is a subject ripe for abuse, particularly when it comes to those with excess space. The ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ mentality popular in American culture, indeed part of the mainstream since the 1950s, has exacerbated the worst elements of interior design while avant-garde minimalist design remained rather…

“So briefly rests the dew upon the bush clover Even now it scatters in the wind.” -death poem of Lady Murasaki from the Tale of Genji (c.1010) reflecting on the brevity of her own life A new year is upon us. The tumultuous year 2020 has begun to fade into…

The torch of Enlightenment shone, dimly at first, but firmly in the midst of the eighteenth century. The stultifying Old Regime authorities and decadent Parisian elites clashed to form an uneasy powder key of an environment in the French capital during the decades preceding the cataclysmic French Revolution. The Genevan…

The tragic late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries has obscured one of the most last influences in the history of two great nations of East Asia : Japan and Korea. The relationship between Japan and Korea had been dramatically different in the centuries before 1870, with the exception of Hidyoshi’s invasions in…