March 29, 2016 edition
Einstein was completing his curriculum vitae one day in 1932. The prestigious Kaiser Leopold German Academy of Scientists, where Goethe had once been a member, had asked him to join.
He had to answer nine questions. To question number eight he answered, "several medals were awarded me." But he did not explain what those medals were for. Nor did he state that in 1921 he had received the Nobel Prize for Physics...
Read More
More Sidelines articles in other editions
March 22, 2016 edition
I was gingerly finding a path on roots in the peat land, tread by tread in the reddish water oozing between the trunks of the jelutong and ramin trees. The dense foliage of the new branches still clustered thickly shading the way, but soon it became evident: the 'poems written on the sky' have been almost wiped out at Sabangau River.
Millions of trees have been felled. Central Kalimantan's 568,000 hectares of tropical forest is almost gone. Human greedthe continuous plunder of the timber for personal wealthhas wounded this environment to its very core.
Read More
March 15, 2016 edition
Amangkurat is loneliness: the friendless king on an island.
In early January 1648, Amangkurat, the ruler of Mataram, moved his palace from Karta to Plered, a location in the area of Bantul where the Winogo River had been dammed. Construction had already begun of man-made lakes around the palace.
Read More
March 8, 2016 edition
In a house in a dank alley in Paris on March 24, 1897, a 67-year-old man is writing. We do not know who he is. As the Narrator begins his story in Umberto Eco's novel The Prague Cemetery, no one has yet 'been named'.
Even the man himself does not remember who he is. Two days earlier, when he awoke, he knew he was 'Captain Simonini'. But then he discovers other facts: he is Abb Dalla Piccola, "or rather, the person everyone knows as Abb Dalla Piccola."
Read More
March 1, 2016 edition
Fayadh escaped the death sentence. The news came in early February: his sentence was commuted to eight years jail and 800 lashes.
Ashraf Fayadh, a 36-year-old poet, is an arts curator who published a collection of poems titled Instructions Within and was arrested by Syariah police in 2013. The Saudi Arabian judge thought him an apostate. He was sentenced to death by beheading or hanging.
Read More
February 23, 2016 edition
There is a story about a Bedouin living far from Damascus, in the interior of Syria, who was disappointed when he rode a train for the first time. "I'm not satisfied," he complained to his friend. "The ticket was expensive, but the journey ended too quickly."
This might sound stupidlike other stories city people make up to poke fun at country peoplebut actually the Bedouin makes modern people aware: reaching someplace 'quickly', which to most of us is the formula of achievement in our times, might not equate the value of experience. Speed produces results but at the same time wards off something else.
Read More
February 16, 2016 edition