There are all sorts of bargains you make with yourself when you’re about to give in to an addiction. And the peculiar thing is that all the while you’re making these bargains, there’s another part of you sat outside of yourself that looks in and knows how ridiculous all of the promises are. How you’ll break every one. Max made all of these bargains as he left the tube and walked towards his flat.

For example, if he could only drink so much tonight that he had the most horrific night of his life, then that would be enough to…

“I want to go back to your place. And not that place you rent to play out this charade, the place where you actually live.”

Lucy hadn’t touched her coffee yet.

“What do you mean, sweetie?”

“You know what I mean. Dad.”

It was the way she said ‘Dad’. It was the way she said ‘that place’. It was the way she said ‘your place’. It was something in the way she was sitting. What was it. She knew.

Max reached for his professional instincts. It was like trying to hang onto a duvet when your mother was waking you…

There was a café round the corner from the pig place where Charlie would wait for Lara. The pig place had some fancy evangelical name, which Lara had mentioned several times when talking about the booking, but Charlie couldn’t remember it. Something about using all the parts of a pig so that nothing would go to waste. Fancy ways of cooking offal. Like it was something new, offal. But she liked that Lara was into the details like that, thought a lot about everything, always planned things out for maximum enjoyment.

Lara would pick things like that when her parents…

Within 16 months of the advent of ‘VIDEO-TELEPHONING’, the demand for such a form of communication collapses. Or at least it does in the fictitious but at times uncomfortably-close-to-home world of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The reasons?

(1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech. (1996, p.145.)

The stress of having to maintain a physical aural-visual presence during interpersonal communications (and therefore being unable to distractedly doodle, wear pyjamas, or covertly paint one’s nails and pick one’s nose) birthed a vanity-based stress that made the civilians of…

Among Shanghai’s oldest and least known buildings is the Qing dynasty 书隐楼 (Shu Yin Lou — ‘The Secluded Library’ or ‘Hidden Book Building’.) Built in 1763, today the building houses only one resident: Madame Guo.

To visit Shu Yin Lou is to visit Madame Guo. And to get there is to navigate the narrow alleyways of 天灯浓（Tiandeng Nong — ‘Sky Lantern Lane’) through childhood fantasies of Narnia, Great Expectations, Studio Ghibli films. The lane is barely able to fit a moped but somehow, at no. 77 the path widens to accommodate a wide, imposing gate.

Behind it is a humorous…