opinion – Isidora Works

Isidora & Censorship

No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don’t have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don’t have […]

Best Of, English, My Pen

Back to the 80s

[Disclaimer: the following post is spoiler free.] This is the age of nostalgia. I don’t just say it because I’m no longer in my tweens and, like so many other thirty-somethings decades before me, think that the times and culture of my youth were a thousand times better than what they are now – that is […]

Best Of, English, My Pen, Pen

The Other Martha

Woke up to a could-be-worse movie about her and Hemingway this morning – sadly, it is also the most common result when you run a search for the lady on YouTube. The great Martha Gellhorn is high on my list of Women I Want to be Like When I Grow Up. With a tremendous amount […]

English, My Pen, Pen

Us & Them

It is always Us vs. Them. The Others are different so They must be feared. What was that? You don’t fear Them? We’ll take care of that for you. Repeat after us: Threat. Violence. Terror. Evil. Infidels. Degenerates. One more time. Repeat this everyday – it’s for your own safety. And don’t worry: we’ll remind you. […]

English, My Pen, Pen

An agnostic, a pagan and an Arab Hebrew student walk into a bar…

…not really. We only had lunch. The gathering was meant to be a quiet chat about the Kabbalah, which our Arab friend is studying and of which we know too little about. In light of recent events, however, the conversation naturally moved towards religious discrimination, double standards, media manipulation (on both ends) and downright bigotry. […]

My Pen

Dystopia Time

As much as I would love to, I’m not someone who finishes all the books she starts, most of the times due to my chronic impatience: “Oh dear, I’m wasting all this time reading this here when there’s a gazillion others over there I want to read as well!” (An absurd reasoning but, being a […]

Best Of, English, My Pen, Pen

the Richey Edwards appreciation post

My very first memory of the Manic Street Preachers is the news of Richey’s disappearance. I was about 12 and just starting to get up to date with modern pop & rock after years of listening to nothing but oldies and my dad’s jazz records. There were the hourly updates by Carolyn Lilipaly with footage […]