#GiaBPrompt : Wonders of the World
Herostratus stood before the Temple of Artemis,
in her mind’s eye Artemis relished a memory,
how Herostratus entranced by her immensity
renounced other Goddesses and bowed in fidelity
at the foot of her shrine.
Yet with flames flickering in this dark night,
driven by an unquenchable thirst for life,
Herostratus had set the temple he loved on fire
to shake the Earth with the falling marble columns
and Artemis sighed.
She would have the ruins of the temple remain,
an age-old tribute to man’s destructive nature.
*Inspired by the one of the Seven Wonders of the World, Temple of Artemis…
Look, it’s been a year.
Cozy days at home or drunken nights out, board games add an edge when conversation around the world’s end and pandemics become tiresome. Losing was hardly an issue during my more melodramatic years of adolescence, yet more than a decade later I watched aghast as my opponent lit the Scrabble score card alight. Then, three awful card games later I threatened to poison his drink. When board games bring malice to the home, here are 4 ways to keep perky.
Lock down Round Two made me snap. Despite being the well adjusted adult in the room, losing repeatedly to my partner brought on such deep-seated wrath, I warned him to sleep with his eyes open.
Admittedly, I am a little more high strung than usual, falling into a cyclic pattern of lock down boredom and then anxiety about my relevance to a world I’m disconnected from.
If in addition to this you’re on a social media detox, board games are a way to shoot up an endorphin high when winning, and smack you out cold…
Without Instagram, I am No One
My Instagram posts were full of crap like anyone else. From my initial disdain, the social media app eventually became a friend that followed me on adventures where no one else could — until one day Instagram kicked me off and I was rudely awakened to life without it.
At first Instagram hardly caught my attention, satisfied with the odd post on Facebook. I was content with my love life, I had witty friends to divulge all our tales of social activism with and I had a career at a little foreign policy NGO driving me onward. Experiencing all the…
Friends without the s-e-x can work, right?
What the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral gets right is that you’re bound to bump into inconvenient truths at the most intimate social occasions.
In fact, fluttering emotions like love and fear around these moments mingled together with a heavy dose of nostalgia, provide the perfect conditions for bumping into a past lover. And then what do you do?
‘Cut your losses and move on’ isn’t great break up advice
Feeling raw and deeply unsettled at my friend’s funeral, I found myself smirking at the memories of my friends back when things were different. I was different. A few years younger. Completely out of character on a moonlit night, I…
Yesterday, I apologized for being a dick at work. I didn’t like it.
Let’s begin with the trope of the good person I’d like to think I am. An easy-going smiley-faced post-grad, the people-pleaser. Then one day at work boom! I found myself yelling over the phone.
Can you believe, it took this people-pleaser two years to apologize?
Becoming an adult, piled on with personal and work pressures, I learned how to articulate personal limitations on the job. Repeated throughout business literature, I saw how the workplace required a stronger, craftier me than what I actually was. …
I defied my parents to find a way to travel — and it went well, Dad!
A gap year was never a choice for my family. Plus I was eager to work and become independent. It was only years later that I realized I had missed out and felt pushed to take the leap, leaving my job to teach English abroad.
Coming from the developing South, if you’re lucky enough to secure a job with a salary high enough to travel, the flip side is that your leave days are on average way shorter than a European. …
How my holiday gave me perspective on my country’s handling of the pandemic
Where ever you are in the world, mistakes and miscalculations have been rife in handling the Covid-19 pandemic. Looking for a budget adventure holiday, I had low expectations for the former war-torn country Bosnia and Herzegovina, but it did not fare as badly as I guessed. More than that, the reality check helped me gain some perspective on how I judged my own country. Here are some key points with which to compare your own country.
1. The Government’s Severe Lockdown in BiH
The people of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) find themselves twenty-five years after the Dayton peace accords fighting a new threat, the COVID-19 pandemic. On…
Four ways to determine your leadership style.
Many people love them, many more want to be them — these days the news is splashed with stories of our favorite populists. Drawing on Margeret Hermann’s personality framework, I pull out key characteristics in Boris Johnson’s leadership style for you to check if you have what it takes to be a populist leader.
1. What is your fundamental political belief about power?
Boris Johnson is a high profile politician serving under conservative Tory politics in the United Kingdom. Seeing as Johnson was a leading figure in the BREXIT campaign in 2016, his desire to disconnect from the European Union indicates his conviction that it is up to each…
The European Union’s management of populist pivot countries, Poland and Hungary, offers a thought experiment for the future
Forecasting is a hunted expertise in the world of international relations. In this piece I share one easy method to produce two scenarios on how events in Poland and Hungary influence the EU’s management of populism throughout Europe.
Section One: The Trouble with Forecasting Methodology
Decision-makers look to social scientists for guidance in forecasting. To date, however, the academic international relations community has offered them little useful assistance because it is a murky realm.
Forecasting methods are fiercely debated because they are context specific.
Tamara Naidoo
Global-Scale Thinker, an everyday girl in international relations
