2023 in Review: Separating the Macro from the Micro

Coming into the final weekend of 2023, it seems like a good time to look back on the whole year and what I got up to. There were highs and lows in my own life, while the wider world just seemed to get more chaotic and unpleasant. The trick, as ever, is separating those two facets from each other and recognizing when things have gone well for me.

Taking each of my personal categories one by one, I can say that writing was a mixed bag but probably a little negative overall. I spent a lot of time revising some short stories and a novel, but didn't write anything new or send (almost anything) out for submission. With regard to the novel revisions, I do think that I made some good progress and I should be set up for making some agent submissions in the new year. Also, I hope that having something out on submission makes it easier for me to move ahead to the next project to write - I just wish I could get the balance of writing, revising and submitting stories right.

On the dating front, 2022 was positive just from the perspective of getting out there again, but 2023 was much better, and indeed has to rank higher than any year of my dating life other than 2019, when I met my ex (2020 and 2021 don't count, because I was in a relationship and because the pandemic kept us at home). The process, at least in the first half - or three quarters - of the year, was as enervating and soul-crushing as usual, especially when one date unmatched me on Hinge the same afternoon that we met. But I wasn't exactly surprised at that, or even particularly sad. On the other hand, I had some very good dates later in the year and moved out of my comfort zone, so that has to rank as a positive.

With regard to health and fitness, another mixed bag. I seem to have gained all the weight that I didn't gain during the pandemic, which was negative. I also seem to have plateaued with what I could achieve in my workouts at home - possibly because I've gotten jaded/lazy, or maybe I just got too habituated to the workouts I was doing. I have, however, started going back to the gym, and may start working with a personal trainer again in the new year.

On the money front, things went on as normal. I think I've generally eaten through the pandemic bonus that came from not paying for the gym, the cleaners or traveling, but the point of money is to use it for things that are important, not to hoard it. Also, no matter what I spent on, I still managed to put away decent amounts into my various retirement accounts, so at least that's going well. As always, I'm hoping to build on that in 2024.

For the category that I variously call "life" or "other", I think I did a good job of getting out of the house. I had a good trip to Italy in February, experiencing skiing in the Alps and enjoying life in Turin outside of the summer/fall months when I usually go. I also spent a nice time with my mom in Rome, and then had a fun couple of days to myself in Munich, making for my first trip without family since Stockholm in 2019. I also managed to get out to a good number of cultural events, both online and in person. Regrettably, I didn't do much decluttering, so once again I have to defer that goal to the coming year.

Work had its ups and downs, as always. I started to learn a new topic, and found ways to marry it to the subjects I know more about, so hopefully that synthesis will help in coming years. I think that's all I want to say about that subject.

Overall, then, my own year was probably decent, if not great. I didn't make as much progress as I'd have liked in some of the more important areas, but I am happy about coming further out of my pandemic-related torpor. I wouldn't say it exactly held me back in 2022, but nevertheless it's been important to start living a little more normally again, although I've continued wearing a mask in many indoor and crowded places, and I've kept up with my Covid boosters.

Looking at the world more widely, it's hard to be as optimistic. Politics has just gotten more chaotic and unpleasant worldwide, but especially in the four countries that are my heart's home: the US, the UK, Italy and Germany. The far right is a problem in each, though to varying degrees, but it's surely not overstating things to say that if the US votes in Trump again in 2024, the world as a whole is going to get less safe.

One positive is that the Dobbs decision from last year, which ended the federal right to abortions and devolved it to the states, seems to have galvanized the progressive side of the electorate. However, that doesn't really let the Democratic establishment off the hook for 50 years of ignoring the right's increasing attacks on the right to abortion, culminating in Dobbs; it's also an open question as to whether Democratic voters will continue to mobilize around that topic, or if too many are being turned off by the situation in Israel and Gaza.

I've long argued that there wasn't a single cause for Trump winning the 2016 election, but the most fundamental was that Democrats just couldn't be bothered to turn up, whether for the primaries or the general. 2020 was a different beast, because we'd seen what a Trump presidency entailed (including bungling the pandemic response), and turnout in the primaries was up again. The danger here is that Democrats once again are too jaded to go out and vote when we get to November - whether because they think President Biden is too old, too establishment or they're unhappy with his handling of Israel and Gaza. But because there's no Democratic primary this time, we won't know that before the fall.

Culturally, the biggest story was Twitter. It struck me the other day that Elon Musk has managed to worm his way into everyone's heads the same way Trump did when he was "president" - it's become impossible not to think about him at least once a day (if you'd managed to avoid it until now, sorry). I've had to institute a rule with myself not to click on every story relating one of his outrages, but I've found it harder to keep from clicking on every story about what's going wrong at Twitter. It's also top of mind for me now, because I was forced to update the app recently and it became clear how insulated I'd been from its suckiness as "X". Leaving aside bugs and whatever, it's just no longer enjoyable to surf Twitter - which doesn't stop me from doomscrolling a few times a week.

I could go on, but it boils down this: you know we're fucked when the only sane-looking social media platform is Facebook.

At the macro level, 2024 is probably going to be at least as grim as... well, every year since 2016, really. But this is going to be the year when the criminal cases against Trump (hopefully) really get going, which is going to galvanize the worst of his supporters (btw, I'm not saying he shouldn't stand trial, but I'm acknowledging that this state of affairs is somewhere short of great). The election itself will also be bad: if he wins, that's bad enough, but if he loses, then his supporters are going to go crazy again and we'll have years, probably decades, of these jerks insisting that the election was stolen.

This will also be against the backdrop of increasing global temperatures and wilder weather, plus the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. There's also going to be some other damn-fool thing happening somewhere, which will destabilize the world even more. It could be the UK's general election, but I expect it'll be the collapse of the ruling coalition in Germany and potentially greater inroads for the far right there.  It's clear that far right parties are going to keep coming closer in election after election in Europe, and eventually one is going to attract enough of a majority to actually form a government, unlike in Poland and the Netherlands so far. It'll also be interesting to see what happens in Russia, China, India and Brazil.

I don't mean to get too pessimistic, but it's clear that people aren't going to get sensible overnight. The wave of rightwing populism sweeping the world is caused in large part by anger against the self-satisfaction and complacency of the elites on both right and left, and those elites haven't measurably changed how they do things since 2016. Until they do, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, Georgia Meloni, Javier Milei, Narendra Modi, and above all Trump, aren't going anywhere.

What I Watched and Read and Listened to in 2023

It's Christmas, so the year is basically in the can. I'm going to do a more comprehensive post later on how my year went, but here I wanted to consider books and movies and TV and all kinds of other art I experienced this year. Because the pandemic is influencing my decisions less and less (though I still take certain precautions), it meant I could also start experiencing movies in theaters again, as I wrote in an earlier blog this summer.

I also indulged my geeky/obsessive side more this year by keeping a spreadsheet not only of books I read, which I do every year, but also one each for movies and TV shows. I've always been curious about how much TV I watched, and because I was still quite locked down in 2022 I was watching more movies than usual, so I wanted to see just how much I was watching, and where I was watching them.

The short answer is that HBO Max, and subsequently Max, was where I watched the overwhelming majority of my movies in 2023, and I suspect it's also where I watched most movies in 2022. This is partly skewed by all the DC-related movies I watched, which accounted for almost half of everything I watched on that streamer. But Max also remains one of the best places to see older movies, including from before the 1960s, as well as generally decent films from the past decade or so. At the start of the year I was getting it from a friend, but when he decided to cancel his subscription it was a no-brainer for me to set up my own subscription (and I shared my credential with him, since that seemed only fair).

Overall I watched a decent number of 2023 movies, including some finally back in theaters. Realistically I could have gone back earlier, but it always felt like a hassle to pay $20 to watch a movie with a mask on and having to share a bathroom. Still, it was nice to see something when it came out, rather than waiting months for it to come to Max or Peacock.

Some favorites that I saw this year were Barbie, Oppenheimer, Asteroid City and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, with special honorable mentions for Maestro, Super Mario Bros and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. There's not much to say about Barbenheimer that hasn't already been said, apart from marveling at this cultural moment where the two biggest films of the year were a feminist deconstruction of a children's toy, scheduled against a dense, dour biopic of a mid-century physicist. Without pretending either is high-brow, it's heartening to see that people still enjoy smart movies.

Asteroid City is probably the movie that haunted me the most in 2023. I'll have to do a blog about Wes Anderson at some point, but this movie showed how he's much more than just the meticulously designed camera tableaux that everybody imitated for their generative AI pastiches of his work. I'm not entirely sure I understood it all, and I had to watch a couple of YouTube discussions to get a better sense of it, but it certainly worked as a meditation on the pandemic and its dislocations. It doesn't rank as highly for me in his oeuvre as Grand Budapest Hotel, Rushmore or Royal Tenenbaums, but it's a worthy addition.

Super Mario Bros and D&D were both surprisingly better than I'd expected. To put it another way, I had higher hopes for D&D, which it met, and lower hopes for Mario, which it exceeded. Chris Pratt remains my least favorite Hollywood Chris (and coincidentally, Pine is probably my favorite), but Mario was entertaining enough and made enough cute references to impress me that I was finally seeing a beloved character onscreen. Maestro, meanwhile, was anchored by Bradley Cooper's great performance and also his clear love of both cinematic language and Bernstein's music.

TV was more of a mixed bag, especially the shows that came out this year. First off, there wasn't a single streaming service that dominated like in my movie watching. Disney Plus probably accounted for more TV shows than any other streamer, but it was fairly close. I don't buy into the doom and gloom surrounding the MCU at the moment, but it was notable that Secret Invasion was a pretty spectacular misfire. On the Star Wars side, season 3 of the Mandalorian and season 1 of Ahsoka were okay but never scaled the heights of last year's Andor.

Some favorites were the latest seasons of Picard, Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks, which all traded in varying degrees on heavy nostalgia and in-universe references. Picard was so good that it almost made me mad, considering how inessential it made the previous two seasons, but it was good to see the old gang back together. SNW and Lower Decks, meanwhile, just went from strength to strength, with SNW in particular showcasing a range of genres that you really never get in Trek.

Succession's final season was pretty compelling too. For me the high point (SPOILERS!) was the episode where Logan died, and it was fascinating seeing how that event shone new light on certain characters. For instance, when Kerry showed up at the memorial and was kicked out by Marcia, it was oddly illuminating that Roman was the one who comforted Kerry and treated her kindly. The finale was a bit of a letdown for me, though.

I've also talked about how much I loved Slow Horses, and that's inspired me to start reading the full book series. But some MVPs that held my attention this year were Fargo and the Expanse. I started watching Fargo via Netflix's DVD.com, RIP, and just adored the first two seasons in particular. Season 3 had some high points but wasn't quite as successful, though still better than a lot of other stuff. I have yet to watch the fourth season, as that wasn't available on DVD.com, but I'm hoping to catch that and season 5 in the near future.

Meanwhile, the Expanse got better with each season. I originally watched the first two seasons on Netflix, pre-pandemic, back when SyFy was airing it; they were faithful recreations of the books, but the interest was more in seeing characters and plot lines foreshadowed or appearing earlier than in the books; it suffered a little from the same syndrome as the first season of Game of Thrones, where the world was well-realized but thinly populated. However, the show really came to life in season 4, when they went to Ilus, and I'm now midway through season 5. I'm preemptively a little sad about season 6, because it's a short one and it's clear they won't be able to fully tackle the Laconian invasion from the last few books.

Another honorable mention was the Last of Us. I had the great pleasure of watching the show at the same time that I was playing the game, so that an hour or two per week let me keep up with the show. I also thought the show was paced brilliantly, giving us digressions like Bill and Frank or Ellie's backstory at the exact right times. It also did a great job of conveying the same emotions in certain scenes as in the game, like when Ellie sees the wild giraffes toward the end. I've never played Part II, but I'll be interested to see how the second season of the show goes.

Speaking of games, Last of Us dominated the early part of my game-playing in 2023, but when I finished that I started up another one that I hadn't touched since I got it, Dragon Age: Inquisition. It's been fun to play that and to look at all the resources on the web that have sprung up over the ten years since it came out. It's a very complex game, though, and sometimes I'm in more of a mood for something easy, that I can boot up and start without worrying about updates and cutscenes.

Super Mario Wonder, on the Switch, filled that niche for me. The learning curve is simple if you've ever played a Mario game before, but it also does a nice job of adding new elements. Whereas The Last of Us or Dragon Age are sprawling games with lots of areas to explore, it's easy to get through a lot of Super Mario Wonder's levels quickly and soon you find yourself ready to beat the game. I'm hoping to finish Inquisition this coming year and also Wonder, and to take on more of my immense backlog of Switch games.

In terms of books, I didn't read a lot of recent stuff, but I did enjoy Annalee Newitz's The Terraformers - even if it's not quite as mind bending as Autonomous was, their books are always reliably entertaining. I also bade farewell to Genevieve Colman's Invisible Library series, which came to a satisfying end, and in the new year I'll be starting on her next book, Scarlet, featuring vampires during the French Revolution. Wes Chu's War Arts Saga also made its way onto my Kindle app, and I'm looking forward to continuing that one as well.

Special mention also goes to Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club. I ran out of books to read while in Munich, so I found it at an English-language bookshop near the university, and tore through it (luckily I finished it after I got home). I'd been hearing about it for a while, because I follow Osman's agent on Twitter, so I got to see for myself how enjoyable it is. It's an odd, but pleasing, counterpoint to Mick Herron's Slow Horses books, and I'm finishing the rest of the series soon. Just a shame Osman didn't start his series back in 2010, like Herron did, because I'd love to have a big backlog to catch up with.

In terms of listening, I continued my British bands project, and quite enjoyed Erasure's back catalog. In new stuff, I discovered Olivia Rodrigo because I go to the gym again, and Get Him Back! is a fun companion song to Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone.

And finishing up with comics, I already mentioned my new subscription to Marvel Unlimited in my last post. It was prompted by my discovery of Comics Conspiracy in Sunnyvale, and my subsequent spending of crap tons of money on old Excalibur, X-Factor and Vertigo collections. I'm still in the early phases of the Uncanny X-Men, but as the year goes on I hope to branch out into more recent books, though for this year I'm probably not going to focus on Spider-Man or the Avengers yet. 

For 2024, I haven't decided if I'm going to keep tracking movies and TV shows, or if I'll add music, podcasts or video games to my spreadsheet, but overall, I've been taking in a lot of stories and stuff for the past two years. In the coming year, I want to spend less time consuming art and more time making it - but I'll have more to say in my final summing-up post.

Thoughts on Marvel Unlimited

Despite my high-minded protestations that I don't really "do" Black Friday or Cyber Monday, this year I snagged some "deals" on the types of things that I usually buy compulsively. One was a set of fancy underwear that usually gets recommended by Wirecutter, another was a set of fancy notebooks from Field Notes (also inspired by some research on Wirecutter, and now among the 113 fancy notebooks I own, but so it goes).

The final one, which wasn't strictly a Cyber Monday deal because they seem to offer it to everyone who signs up for the first time, was a $19 discount off a year's subscription to Marvel Unlimited, Marvel Comics' digital comics archive. I've gone on a bit of a buying spree this year, having discovered a comic shop in Sunnyvale, but I'd been meaning to check out digital comics for a while. I could have chosen DC Universe Infinite, but I've been buying and reading more Marvel comics lately, so I decided to check out Unlimited instead... or rather, first, since I'll probably try out the DC one at some point soon.

As I said, I've been interested in digital comics for a while, especially since a coworker at a previous job told me about Marvel's subscription service. One of the things he mentioned was being able to go straight to crossover issues, which struck me as a good feature.

Alas, I haven't discovered that feature in Marvel Unlimited. It may be available only in the web version, or it may be available only in DC's app, or I may even have misunderstood what he was saying. On the other hand, when I have gone looking for a specific issue because it crossed over with something else I was reading, it's been quite easy to find. That's important because the archive on Marvel Unlimited is over 30,000 issues, most stretching back to the early 1960s but in the case of Captain America Comics, going all the way back to 1941.

So in this post I'm going to talk about my experience with the app so far. Overall, it's totally worth it, even if you pay the full $69 for a yearly subscription, but there are a few snags that are worth highlighting.

Starting with the positives, the first one is that huge archive. Assuming there are exactly 30,000 comics available (it's actually somewhere over 31,000, but bear with me), you'd have to read about 83 issues per day over 365 days to get through the full archive. That may or may not be feasible because, assuming 10-15 minutes to read each issue, it'd probably take between 13 and 21 hours per day to maintain that pace. For early issues written by Stan Lee or Roy Thomas (or indeed later issues written by Chris Claremont) you might need more minutes per book, because they're somewhat verbose.

Take that thought experiment for what it's worth, but the point is that there's almost everything you could think of if you're a Marvel Zombie. There are some gaps here and there, but as far as I can tell, none are particularly important, unless you're a fan of Alpha Flight or want to catch up on non-Marvel properties like Rom the Spaceknight or GI Joe (which was actually a pretty decent comic). The MAX line, for "mature readers", is also missing, but those books never really fulfilled their promise to compete with DC's Vertigo, so it's not the biggest loss. Big-name characters like the X-Men are pretty well-represented, as I found when I counted out the entire run of Uncanny X-Men from 1963 to 2011.

There are gaps in secondary series even in that family of books, like issues 51-54 and 55-59 of the original run of X-Factor, or a bunch of later issues of the original run of Excalibur. From what I understand, those gaps are because those issues have never been collected anywhere, but Marvel is constantly adding new issues to the archive. Most are actual new issues, as it adds books 3 months after physical publication, but some are also older, such as those Excalibur back-issues I mentioned.

The comics themselves look pretty good, at least on my iPad. My reading so far has focused on stuff from the early 60s (Uncanny X-Men) and from the mid- to late 80s (X-Factor, Excalibur and various books that cross over with them). The scans are smooth and high-quality, so you don't get that dot effect in the old issues from 1963; in a couple of Thor issues from 1988 or so, the colors seem to have been remastered via computer, so they look a lot fuller than they probably would have on newsstands at the time. The X-Factor issues that tie into those Thor books don't seem to have had the same remastering, but they still look pretty great.

In terms of quality they remind me of the Epic Collections I started buying in recent months, although for the X-Factor and Excalibur collections, the bulk of the coloring remasters seems to have been saved for the covers, which do look amazing. When I compare prices, I'll be comparing to these versions, instead of the hardcover Masterworks collections or the black-and-white Essentials.

As far as value for money, I was looking up the costs of physical collections of these same books, and I think I've already more than broken even. Volume 1 of the Epic Collection of Uncanny X-Men, which includes issues 1-23, costs $50, so it's taken me less than a month of reading one issue per day to just about break even on Uncanny alone. However, in that time I've also read the equivalent of Volume 2 of the X-Factor Epic Collection, which probably costs between $35 and $50... or it would if it were available anywhere, which it isn't.

If I manage to read all the books I've saved to my library in this coming year, I'll probably save the equivalent of around $1,000 in trade paperback collections. This is on top of the fact that not all collections are in print all at the same time, as mentioned - there may be gaps in some series, but the archive is still more complete than what Marvel makes available in print.

There are some negatives, though. The first is more a problem with Marvel's way of doing things, namely the way they restart series multiple times to get more "collector's item" first issues out there. There seem to be a lot of Daredevil series, for instance, so it can require the Wikipedia page to determine which series to read in which order.

The app is a little buggy, and comics don't always load when I tap on them, so that I either have to wait a long time or quit the app and open it again. One time an issue got stuck transitioning between two pages, so I had to quit out again. However, it's never lost my place in a given issue or series, so that's already a plus.

As I mentioned, I read the comics on my iPad. I prefer to read them in full page mode, with the screen depicting a single page of a print issue, but you can also set a book to "Smart Panel" mode, which shows one main panel at a time and includes transitions. Smart Panel is not a bad way to read a book, because it makes the images larger and guides you through them without your eyes skipping forward or back as you read, but it's tough to get out of the mode when you choose it. Full page mode is the default setting on the iPad, but Smart Panel is the default on the web version, and I never figured out how to transition to full page mode.

Speaking of the web version, it doesn't synch with my iPad, so (unless I'm missing something) I can't pick up my library on other devices. The search function is also a lot worse on the web than on iPad - on the app, I can search for a specific issue and it'll come up, but on the web there's a lot more wading through long lists of issues. This is a big problem when looking through a series like Fantastic Four, which ran to hundreds of issues.

These problems with the web version don't affect me as long as I have my iPad and an internet connection, but I feel like there's more tinkering I should do on the web. At the very least, though, it's disappointing that logging in with one credential on my laptop or tablet doesn't show me my library.

Overall, though, it's been a good investment and a fun way to delve deep into the X-Men archives. If I stick with one issue of Uncanny per day, I'll only get to about #365, so sometime in the 90s, and it won't give me time to catch up with the other characters I want to follow, like Spider-Man, Daredevil, the Avengers or the Fantastic Four, unless I keep my subscription for the next ten years or so. But as I said, sticking with the X-Men family of books and the stuff I've saved to my library, I'll save hundreds of dollars compared with buying at the store.

Of course, that's only saving me money on Marvel books. DC has a longer history of packaging storylines for collections, and has recently been collecting entire runs in one or two volumes, so unless I also get a DC subscription, that comics budget is likely to go to Volume 2 of the Dennis O'Neil/Denys Cowan Question series, among others.

Still, I like having the majority of the Marvel Universe at my fingertips, and I'm enjoying reading these old comics in a format that makes the art and lettering look great, even for older books. If you're at all a fan of Marvel's big-name characters, you should definitely get this subscription. Even at the full price of $10 per month, it's an amazing value.

Spoiler-Filled Thoughts on Slow Horses

For the last few weeks I've been enjoying Slow Horses on Apple TV Plus, with Gary Oldman as the main character Jackson Lamb and Kristin Scott Thomas as his opposite number in MI5, Diana Taverner. I knew about it as a book series, of which I'd previously read the second volume, because my dad picked that up at random once. I remember enjoying Book Two, named Dead Lions, and had resolved to check out the rest of the series someday.

Someday arrived when I finished the first season of the show, which I devoured in just a little over a week. It's one of those rare adaptations that presents a perfectly realized version of the source material - think later volumes of Harry Potter, in which Hogwarts becomes this enormous, sprawling place with nooks and crannies everywhere, rather than the one or two sets used in the first two movies. Only with Slow Horses, it takes place in a London that's recognizable and true to life.

Because this post contains spoilers, I'm not going to explain the premise of the show, but I will say that it and the book do a good job of conveying London office life. My first job was in a ramshackle old building in Southend with lots of quirks and where the endless tea rounds helped to pass the day. My next job was in a slightly nicer office, but in a quirky neighborhood... and not too far from the Slow Horses' place near the Barbican. Indeed, when they convene at Blake's grave in season 1, that scene takes place in Bunhill cemetery, where I used to take my lunch on nice days.

In that way, Slow Horses is a bit of a spiritual successor to John le Carré's spy novels, especially the ones centered around George Smiley. When le Carré passed away, one of the obituaries said that much of his books' appeal lay in the fact that they were chronicles of office life, ranging from interminable meetings to petty office rivalries. Slow Horses captures that vibe well, right down to the one try-hard who's always trying to get people to go to the pub.

Another thing I liked about the show is that the first season fleshes out certain things better than the book does. The three white nationalist kidnappers are given more motivation and explanation than in the book, and you see their fate after the failure of their plan, whereas in the book Hassan Ahmed manages to escape without the help of the Slow Horses. Indeed, in the book, the bulk of the Slow Horses are passive and don't accomplish much of note after a certain point, just sitting in a cafe near Old Street, whereas in the show they bravely sally forth to save Hassan.

Though in true Slough House fashion, two of them forget to get gas and are stranded by the road on the way to Epping Forest.

I was able to contrast the first book with the first season because I finished them fairly close to one another, but I didn't do that with season 2, because I finished the second book more than two years ago and wasn't sure if I wanted to read it again. Still, I flipped through bits of it as I was watching the last episode of the season, and it's clear that they made some big changes to how the Russians' plot plays out.

I've now started on season 3, and while I haven't bought the third book yet, I think I'll be reading that pretty soon, so I'll have a better sense of where the two works diverge. In the meantime, I've been enjoying the development of the characters' relationships to each other, even as they themselves don't really grow into competent (or even, in some cases, likable) people. It helps that they got actors of the caliber of Gary Oldman to star in it - he makes one of his typical transformations into the shambling wreckage that is Jackson Lamb, and truly breathes life into him, to the point that when I read Lamb's passages in the first book I saw Gary Oldman in the role.

The other nice thing is that, regardless of how many seasons Apple TV greenlights, there are about 8 books in the series, plus a bunch of novellas and related works, so I'll have a fair amount to catch up on. I'm especially looking forward to seeing who's still around by book 8, and how many parts of London they visit that I know well.

Actually, I Quite Like Splitting Books by Genre

The two main spurs for my blog posts here (apart from obituaries) are podcasts I've listened to or articles I've read in the Guardian. Among the latter, my hunting ground is typically in the football section, but this time it was a piece in the culture section, musing on whether we should abolish literary genres. My first thought on reading the headline was that it would be about getting rid of genre shelves in bookstores, but it turns out rather to be a discussion of books that don't fit neatly into a single genre - or what the writer imagines those genres to be.

They don't disparage any of the commercial genres, and indeed get closer to disparaging the whole concept of "literary fiction", which I can't help but agree with. But I'm always a little uncomfortable with the idea of getting rid of different sections in bookstores, or of discounting genres, mainly because I feel that the genres I like would get strangled out. 

As far as Alex Clark's argument, it boils down to the idea that books are hard to categorize when they include concepts that you'd find in thrillers or horror or speculative fiction. In Clark's defense, those elements used to appear in lots of kinds of stories which we don't consider to be "genre" - Hamlet and MacBeth and A Christmas Carol all feature ghosts, for example, and yet they don't get shelved with Stephen King or Ramsay Campbell.

There's also the Sandra Bullock film Gravity, which I've had many arguments about, concerning whether it's science fiction. Some people I've spoken to said it was, because it takes place in space; I said it wasn't, because it all involves technology that currently exists. The film's Wikipedia page calls it SF but quotes its director Alfonso Cuarón as saying that he doesn't consider it SF. The difficult thing is that it would indeed have been speculative a few decades ago.

Unspoken in Clark's article in the Guardian is the question of what line demarcates genre fiction from the stuff you'd shelve at the front of the store. Clark doesn't say it, but there's clearly an issue of quality - horror and crime and SF were traditionally dashed off quickly to be published in crappy magazines. This perception persists when someone like Margaret Atwood insists that the Handmaid's Tale can't be science fiction because science fiction consists of lasers and talking squid in space.

This leads me into my concern about collapsing the literary and genre shelves together in bookstores. No less a luminary than George RR Martin has called for this, but I don't think he's thought through the implications of it. I'm speaking from experience, because I once encountered a WH Smiths in Liverpool Street Station that lumped all its fiction together.

The upshot was that I couldn't find anything I wanted to read there, both because looking for SF books meant poring through every single shelf, and because the only genre books were the best-known ones. Realistically, if you have only one shelf for fiction, you're not going to waste space on unknown or low-selling authors of any specific genre, you're going to place people like Martin or JRR Tolkien for SFF, or Raymond Chandler and John le Carré for crime and thrillers, or Stephen King for horror.

Maybe it's just how I browse, but when I go to the SF section of a bookstore, but I like spreading out from the authors I already know to find new authors whose books promise something similar. That kind of discovery is impossible if a bookstore is only stocking the sure bets.

It's perhaps unfair to single out a crappy bookstore in a train station, where people just want something to help them while away the time they'll waste on inevitable train delays and signal failures (I still have PTSD from several brutal delays in and around London), but this example is also relevant to non-fiction books. There are two bookstores near where I live, one of which categorizes its history shelf by country and region (Ancient history, world history, Asian history, European, US, WWI, etc), while the other just lumps all its history books together, categorized alphabetically by author.

I can more reliably find something to read at Bookstore A, which separates history books out, than at Bookstore B, where I have to pore through the entire shelf to make sure I haven't missed something I'd find interesting. At Bookstore A, if I'm in the mood for a book on Ancient Rome, I just go to the section reserved for ancient history and see what they have; at Bookstore B, the process takes longer and is more annoying.

Coming back to fiction, the point where I'd agree with the Guardian article that prompted this blog is in the case of authors who write in different genres. George RR Martin himself is a good example: he's best known for A Song of Ice and Fire, which is high fantasy, but he's also written science fiction and horror, the latter of which typically gets shelved separately from his other stories. But if you're looking for more of his specific back catalog, you might never even hear of Fevre Dream if you never look at the horror section. This might be why many authors use pseudonyms when writing in a new genre.

It's an imperfect system, the one we use to categorize books, but I think it's still better than all the other possibilities. Switching from physical media to digital TV and music and movies has made it harder to find new stuff, and the same generally applies to e-books - serendipitous discoveries are still more likely in physical bookstores, and if it means ghettoizing all the science fiction in one place for me to find the best new SFF stories, I'm willing to make that sacrifice.

After all, having that smaller shelf also means it's easier to ignore the type of SFF books that I don't care about.

RIP Terry Venables

The big news out of the world of English football this weekend was the death of Terry Venables, the former England, Barcelona and Tottenham Hotspur manager. While those are the ones that I've heard bandied about most in the couple of days since his passing was announced, they're possibly the most high-profile among a long series of jobs starting back in 1976.

Venables wasn't the most successful English manager around, nor the one about whom I had the most knowledge. But he was the manager of the English national team during Euro 96, which was one of the formative experiences of my football fandom, and was the last manager to lead England to a tournament semifinal until Gareth Southgate in 2018.

I think like every fan who was there to watch that tournament, I've built up a mythology about the team he brought to Euro 96. Despite the so-called Golden Generation of later tournaments, that squad was full of big names, not just 80s and 90s icons like Tony Adams, Stuart Pearce and Paul Gascoigne, but also upcoming stars like Gary Neville and Sol Campbell. Up front he had Alan Shearer and Teddy Sheringham, who are also names to conjure with.

What I remember about them is their athleticism and doggedness, two qualities that I don't think were present in later England squads (though the 1998 World Cup quarterfinal against Argentina also stands out as an epic England performance). They were a good canvas on which to project the nation's hopes and fears, to say nothing of the tournament song, Three Lions.

I know less about his time at Barcelona, but ironically that's where he had his greatest success, helping them win their first title since 1974 and reach the final of the European Cup for the first time since 1961. He also brought in English striker Gary Lineker, who had three great seasons for the club, before joining Venables at Spurs.

There are two interesting aspects to Venables's time in Spain: the first is that he got the job based on his performance managing Crystal Palace and Queens Park Rangers - two teams that weren't even in the top-flight when he took them over. You can't really imagine Barcelona hiring an English manager on that kind of record these days.

The other interesting aspect is just the fact that Venables was English. These days you don't see a lot of English managers abroad, and certainly not in the highest-profile teams... or in the highest-profile teams in England, for that matter (other than Frank Lampard walking with misplaced confidence into the Chelsea job). The 80s were a difficult time for English football, because of crowd violence that culminated in the 1985 Heysel disaster and led to English teams being banned from European competition until the 90s.

Venables represented another aspect to the English game, and a path not taken - he and Bobby Robson and Roy Hodgson are the biggest names to have managed abroad, but it seems a shame that more English managers didn't get the chance to pick up the tricks of the trade from the other big leagues. That ban likely made it more difficult for promising English managers to get hired for the big jobs, which has to have set them back years.

England isn't the only team whose players don't travel well - Italian players are famous for not doing well abroad, and the ones who do rarely get picked for the Italian national team. But this lack of managerial experience abroad has been particularly bad for the English, since no Englishman has won the top-flight of English football since 1992, the year before the Premier League began. While most of those titles were won by a Scot, Sir Alex Ferguson, no British manager has won the top-flight since he retired in 2013.

So Venables stands as one of the most successful English managers in history, and one of the few to have won a title abroad. He never had as high-profile a gig in the UK after Euro 96, but he always remained an eminence grise in the game, even recording the odd England theme single from time to time. It's a shame that more English managers didn't follow in his footsteps, but it's telling that one of the players he consoled after the loss in 1996 is Gareth Southgate, who replaced him as the most successful England manager since 1966.

Thoughts on 10 Years of Living in the US

This milestone has been coming for a while, but it's finally upon me: as of Christmas, it'll be 10 years since I moved back to the US after spending most of my 20s in the UK. The moment it truly hit me was a week or so ago, when Facebook sent me one of its periodic reminders of old posts. In this case it was harking back 10 years to the day I posted I'd just bought my last monthly travelcard for the Tube.

That got me thinking about how I've spent that time, and whether it's been a good decision. While it may be a mixed bag, I would say that overall moving here was the right choice.

So what's the good, and what's the bad from this last decade? To answer that I have to separate out the things in my own life from what's been happening to the world more widely. I also have to present a picture of what life was like in London at the time that I made the decision to come back here.

The first thing to say about London in 2013 is that things were a mixed bag there, too. I finally had a good job, that I was doing well at and getting recognized for, which I think has eluded me ever since. I was also in the world's greatest city for publishing, and in that final year that I lived there, I got to experience some of it for myself by going to publishing events and the World Fantasy Con in Brighton, which remains one of the high points of my life. More generally, I also loved being in a city that had so much culture, and access to the rest of Europe and the rest of the world.

On the negative side, life was getting more expensive. I'd spent several years living in East London but when the 2012 Olympics came I found myself priced out and having to take increasingly grim accommodations with increasingly grim flatmates. This was partly my doing, because I insisted on living in Zone 2, but that wasn't an unthinking choice: the farther out I lived, the longer and more complicated my commute would be. Personally as well, my social life was withering a bit as my friends got married, had kids and moved out of London to increasingly remote suburbs. At the same time, there was a feeling of not finding someone to be with there in London, which also hastened my desire to come back here.

By contrast, California, and the Bay Area in particular, looked like it had all the stuff I wanted. Good weather, good food, my family, and a large core group of friends, as well as the sense of being more of an adult: in London, my life was bounded by the city, which meant anything I wanted to do outside of it meant figuring out public transportation. If I wanted to go someplace that public transit didn't reach, then I didn't go there. Whereas I reasoned that here in the US, I'd have a car and I'd be able to go pretty much wherever I wanted.

My timing was also good. When I started a new job in July of 2011, I met a sales rep who lived out here and who expressed a desire to have an analyst based in California to take advantage of the tech scene here. I bided my time, doing good work, and in 2013 resolved that this would be the year I moved back, so I put it to my company, and worked with our head of research to make it work. By the end of the year, another part of our company was setting up an outpost in the Bay Area, just 20 minutes from my house, and so the writing was on the wall.

Of course, there was a big adjustment coming to live here permanently again. I always described myself as never having been a grownup here in the US, and this past decade has been eye-opening in terms of learning how to navigate life in this country. Company benefits, especially healthcare, have been a never-ending source of frustration, but at least I feel like I've figured them out; same for taxes, though I still miss the simplicity of the UK system, where I got a P60 every April that told me how much tax I'd paid, and that was it.

On the work front, there have been ups and downs. I stayed with the company that transferred me here for four years before being laid off and having to take a three-month contract job back in London. I then found myself at State Farm for almost three years, before landing at my current gig. Once I got out of my old company, my pay jumped to levels I'd never even considered, which has made life so much better - I currently make more than twice as much as I did before getting laid off, and probably three or four times more than what I earned in London.

Dating has been generally better here, though it took a while to really take off. I did find myself going on more first dates than I had in London, but I went on way fewer second or third dates. That changed over a few years, but finally in 2019 I met someone for the first time who I really liked, and equally importantly, who liked me. That came to an end thanks to the pressures of the pandemic, but it was good while it lasted, so I'm grateful that she came into my life when she did. It also feels like I've had a little more dating luck since then, so hopefully I'll have more good news to report here soon...

My friend group has stayed pretty constant in this past decade, even despite them all getting married and having kids. I even managed one of those most difficult achievements, and made a new friend in my 30s. I also have a couple of good friends (one a former London flatmate) whom I see when I'm doing in Southern California, so it's nice to have someone else to hang out with down there.

The one aspect of my life that hasn't been as good has been health. I've gained so much weight in the years I've been here, compared with London, and it's only recently that I've been properly tackling it. I've already lamented the food culture here, but a thought I had in Munich back in September was telling: everybody smoked there, but their life expectancy is still higher than here, both because of the wider availability of healthcare and the fact that the Germans, despite eating a sausage and potato-based diet, don't cram themselves with the worst foods in huge quantities all the time.

My writing has also taken a bit of a hit, but that's not because of my distance from the world of London publishing (or not only). I suffered lulls there too, but at least here, I've learned to schedule my writing time and guard it jealously. Still, it'd be nice to be able to encounter SFF writers at the pub randomly, like I used to in London.

On the other hand, my dream of getting out into nature and areas not served by public transit has come true. I have my own car, so I can leave town pretty much whenever I want without worrying about train or bus timetables. I also have a built-in road trip partner in the form of my dad, with whom I've gone to the mountains here in California almost every summer since I moved back. Those have been some great trips, and of course it's a privilege to be able to spend time with him as he gets older.

At the macro-level, i.e. federal and global politics, it feels generally clear that I made the right decision to move here, but it hasn't been a bed of roses, by any means. When I arrived at the end of 2013, the shooting of Trayvon Martin had happened, as had the Sandy Hook massacre and the Citizens United decision at the US Supreme Court. But the Black Lives Matter movement came to prominence in 2014, after the Michael Brown shooting and various other police/state crimes against Black people, and in response the right wing has gone increasingly crazy, to the point of electing Donald Trump as president in 2016.

I spent most of the George W Bush years abroad, so maybe I haven't internalized how grim it was here, but the Trump years and the craziness since have been on another level entirely. I've talked about the parallels with Ancient Rome, but it's depressing that I'm fully expecting a Viktor Orban style illiberal "democracy" to be instituted here in my lifetime. I don't know what I'll do if that happens, or where I'll go, because the far right has coordinated itself everywhere, including back in Britain.

The thing that makes me most grateful to have moved here was, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic. Hearing my sister's experiences in London, and contrasting them with my isolated but mostly okay existence here, I honestly think I might not have survived it if I'd stayed there. At the very least, I'd expect to have caught it once prior to the vaccines being available, which would have been pretty serious. The UK and US both botched their responses, but at least here in California I was in a place that took it seriously, and lived separately enough from others that I was able to isolate, including working from home. Working from my increasingly tiny and grim flats in London during a global pandemic, with flatmates, and with stricter restrictions than any we had here in the US, doesn't bear thinking about.

So overall, yes, I'd say the move here was a good thing. Unlike when I left the UK at the end of 2004, to go to grad school, I don't feel like I missed out on as much by leaving in 2013. Indeed, that time I was back in the UK in less than two years, whereas now, Brexit notwithstanding (and an abiding regret is that I didn't pick up a British passport when I could have) I haven't felt a particular pull to move back permanently, other than wanting to see my friends and visit the cultural spots in Britain.

In the final summation, London never felt like home. There were, and are, many things I liked about the rhythms of living there, but I feel like my existence is so much better here, that going back would involve too many compromises that I no longer want to make. I hope my days of traveling and living abroad aren't over, but overall I'm happy to say that coming back to California was the right choice.

Now, let's see how the next 10 years go.

Newsflash: People in Palo Alto Buy a Lot of Teslas

This headline is up there with "Trump Indicted" and "Dog Bites Man" for predictability, but it's worth exploring for a moment, because there are some trends underlying the popularity of EVs, especially here in places like Palo Alto. The main one is that they do primarily seem to be Teslas, and not other brands like Polestar or Rivian; the other is that, being Teslas, they're on the more expensive end, though I'll admit I'd find it hard to identify the electric versions of normal cars as I run past. The upshot, though, is that on my run this morning, I counted 96 American-made cars, and 49 of those were Teslas.

Taking a step back, this is one of the things I think about when I'm running (another prominent one being the Roman Empire, of course). I don't listen to music or podcasts when I run, because I want to be able to hear cars or bikes behind me, so I either think about history or I conduct little ad-hoc market research projects by counting certain types of cars.

I've been doing it for ten years now, and I've been running in the same neighborhood, so I've got a general sense of car buying trends, at least for that section of South Palo Alto. There might be a different picture if I crossed Oregon and/or Middlefield, but that'll have to wait for when I start training for marathons again.

Sometimes I count SUVs or Priuses, other times I count by country of manufacture, i.e. the US, Japan, Germany, Europe (counting British, Italian, Swedish cars, for example) and South Korea. Sometimes I'll count by manufacturer, and sometimes by sub-brand, though I have a better sense of that for Japanese cars, rather than all the brands that sit under GM, for example.

The trend I've discovered in previous years is that Japanese brands are the most common here, and not by a small margin: on a run a few years ago I counted over a hundred Toyotas alone, and a slightly smaller number of Hondas, with a few other brands here and there. Next most popular were German cars, predominantly Mercedes and BMW, with a few Audis but not many VWs. Lagging behind them were American cars, and on one of my runs I calculated that Teslas accounted for about one-quarter of the total.

As you can imagine, that number's been going up in recent years. I like to joke that Palo Alto has an obscure law requiring that a Tesla (previously a Prius) be visible at all times in public, but the truth is that even Teslas lag behind Japanese cars and SUVs. Still, this was the first time that Teslas accounted for more than half of US brands parked in South Palo Alto driveways.

I've been seeing a lot of talk online recently about the reasons people buy EVs, and environmental reasons are low on that list. One former grad school classmate proudly said that she got hers five years ago to avoid gas stations, and friends who own a Tesla have also said that's a benefit.

There's also an element of conspicuous consumption: the reason I can count how many Teslas there are in my neighborhood is that no one covers them up. I remember laughing about how one house had two cars in the driveway, but the non-Tesla was covered up and the Tesla wasn't. Even when someone does put a car cover over their Tesla, it's helpfully branded so that everyone passing by can see what car it is.

Conspicuous consumption is probably why I don't see a lot of Chevy Bolts/Volts or other brands. To put it another way, the supply of cheap EVs is limited anyway, but if the average Palo Alto buyer was price-conscious, you'd see more of them (I wasn't counting Fiat 500s this morning, electric or gas-powered, but I'd have certainly noticed if there were any around).

On the other hand, Tesla sure does have advantages over other EV brands, premium or "cheap". The first one is brand recognition, since it's been selling cars for a lot longer - I've been seeing Teslas on my route since 2014. That first-mover advantage means that Tesla has had time to build more cars, and time to build more factories to increase supply even further. Contrast that with Rivian, which may make better cars than Tesla, or it may not, but it simply hasn't had the time to build out its manufacturing capacity; whatever the factor, I didn't see a single Rivian truck or SUV on today's run.

The other advantage Tesla has is its charging network, which is more widespread than rivals' networks and is also more reliable. The Biden administration has proposed rules to get uptime of non-Tesla chargers up to 97%, but Tesla's availability is better than that right now. As a result, a lot of EV makers are making their cars compatible with Tesla's network (which has also been politely asked to open up to other brands) and providing adapters.

Coming back to the conspicuous consumption thing for a moment, it's frustrating that the options for EVs seem to boil down to Tesla, Rivian, Polestar, and the only moderately affordable options are the Chevy Bolt/Volt and Nissan Leaf. I've read that the EV market is a lot more widespread in China, in part because you can find EVs for under $35,000 dollars.

It's great that a bunch of people with single-family homes in Palo Alto can afford to buy Teslas, but none of the dedicated EV brands seems to be doing anything for the next segment of consumers. Rivian is helpfully making a less expensive version of their SUV, but it's set to cost $40,000, which isn't exactly mass market pricing. Similarly, Tesla's cheapest Model 3 costs about $43,000, and that's without any add-ons like increased range and fast charging.

EV makers aren't the only ones at fault here, by the way. The availability of chargers is a crucial part too, because who wants to buy a car that they can't refuel/recharge? The Biden plan for chargers may address rules for how well they work, but they're still being built the same way as traditional gas stations: they are being placed in parking lots and other designated places that don't cater to people who live in higher-density housing.

One of the things that impressed me on my trip to Munich was seeing curbside chargers on the street, where you'd normally see parking meters. The US (and other countries) will have to place chargers similarly to cater to all the people who live in condos or urban areas and can't just plug their EVs in at their own garages. 

These thoughts are all a little far away from the number of Teslas I see on my morning runs, but this is where my mind goes when I start counting them like this. Regardless of how I feel about certain people associated with Tesla, or generally about Tesla owners' driving abilities and regrettable license plate choices, I'd love to see more EVs around - particularly because on today's run I got to drink in a cloud of particularly smelly diesel from a pickup by a building site. I just fear that if the EV companies only cater to the type of people who'd buy Teslas or Rivians, they'll have trouble making cars for people who want Civics and Camrys.

Up, Down and Around on a Motorbike with Ewan and Charley

Ever since Ted Lasso ended, I've held onto my Apple TV Plus subscription, because I decided I wanted to finally knock out some of the shows I've had my eye on for a while. These shows include season 2 of Little America, Slow Horses, For All Mankind and Foundation. But first, I wanted to watch all three of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman's travel shows, Long Way Round, Long Way Down and Long Way Up.

I actually got the idea at the beginning of 2022. My sister and her fiancé were visiting, and while I was working they'd be watching episodes of the newest one, Long Way Up, which is an Apple exclusive. It looked interesting, particularly since they were riding electric motorcycles up through Latin America to Los Angeles, but I wanted to start with the first show.

Reader, I didn't get to it then. I finished off season 2 of Ted Lasso, which had lain fallow for a few months, and cancelled my subscription, in order to save the princely sum of $7 or so per month. My one concession toward this quest was reading the book version of Long Way Round, which I serendipitously had nabbed from my stepdad sometime in 2016. I happened to finish it when I was visiting him in April of last year, and he was happy to receive it back, so at least I closed that loop.

Then this year's season of Ted Lasso came out, and as I said, I decided to hold onto the streamer to finish up some of the shows I've been meaning to catch up on. First up was Long Way Round, which I'd actually seen before, back when I lived in London. Shot in 2004, it had them riding from London to New York via Russia, Ukraine and Canada. It was in heavy rotation on Freeview channels like Dave, so I got to see pretty much all of it back then, also because my flatmate at the time was a big motorbike fan.

Long Way Down, from 2007, passed me by, and I didn't even know about Long Way Up, which came out in 2020, until my sister told me about it. Long Way Down reunites Ewan and Charley with their producers, Russ Malkin and Dave Alexanian, as well as cameramen Claudio von Planta and Jimmy Simak, for a ride from London to Cape Town via Italy and most of Eastern Africa. Long Way Up, on the other hand, starts at the very southern tip of Argentina and goes up to LA, where Ewan had moved to between shows.

Overall Ewan and Charley make good traveling companions. They look like they're having a great time, apart from the bits where they're fighting with one another or one of the producers - there's a bit of a blowup in Eastern Europe, and another in Southern Africa, but one assumes that kind of thing is par for the course when you're spending months at a time with the same couple of people, day in and day out, including camping and eating together constantly. The book version of Long Way Round, which is essentially a diary written by the two leads, has a little more conflict than is seen in the show, so I assume there was some friction on Down and Up as well.

It's also kind of fascinating to see the amount of planning that went into each expedition. I say kind of, because the first episode of each series consists entirely of that planning, so you're left feeling a little anxious to get started by the time they actually set off at the end of that episode. But they show the difficulties in getting visas, getting their bikes set up, learning the local languages and even the security training required, since they'd be riding through a few rather hairy neighborhoods.

When they're riding through they take the time to see some sights, frequently motorcycle-related. Long Way Up is where the sightseeing really comes into its own because it's shot in HD and so it looks loads better than the previous shows. They also have a drone, so they can get some amazing shots of Patagonia, Bolivia and Colombia, in particular.

They also stop off for some Unicef-related meet-and-greets, learning about the street kids of Mongolia (one of whom got adopted by Ewan and appears in the Central America portion of Long Way Up), about the former child soldiers of East Africa, and the Venezuelan refugees transiting through Ecuador, among many others. You can see how much these stops affect Ewan and Charley, who each have a couple of kids at the start of the first show, and it's good for me as a viewer to see the work these groups are doing for these children.

The third show, taking place so many years after the previous two, has a certain sense of melancholy about it. They're both visibly older, and Charley in particular looks a little fragile, given that the start of Long Way Up refers to a pretty serious crash he was involved in that put him in hospital for a while and put the whole venture at risk. But also the years seem to have mellowed him - whereas in the previous shows he was always a bit more impulsive and quick to anger, he seems a lot calmer in this latest one. 

In the section in Panama, which he has to do on his own because Ewan's bike needs repairs, he also does a nice job of presenting, showing the functioning of the Panama Canal, among other things. Watching the three shows, and the way fans mob Ewan when they recognize him, you get the feeling Charlie feels a little overshadowed, so it was nice to see a couple of segments where he was the main guy.

I also liked the electric bikes part of Long Way Up. They decided on them because they were interested in the technology, and had some custom bikes built for them by Harley Davidson. Meanwhile, Rivian provided their crew with support vehicles that were prototype R1Ts, so it was interesting to see how they managed to get charged every night where the grids weren't always so reliable and where the infrastructure for EVs wasn't always present.

There's a bit of Boy's Own Adventure to these, given that it consists of two guys leaving their families for months at a time to ride motorcycles in exotic places. Yet it's also a little moving when they ride into their final destination flanked by friends and relatives on a convoy of motorcycles, and they look so happy to be home. There are a couple of lovely moments in the first two shows where they fly one of Ewan's parents in secretly, and surprise him. Also, the moment where they get reunited with their families, just before the final ride into Cape Town or New York or LA, is always heartwarming to see.

In any case, the shows are fun to watch and are good views of these remote parts of the world. I hope they'll be on Apple TV Plus for a long time to come, but either way, I recommend them highly.

I'm a Guy Who Thinks About Ancient Rome. Here's Why You Should Too

There's always some controversy happening on social media. Sometimes it's an ambiguously colored dress, or a YouTuber turns out to have a more exciting personal life than they've let on. In September 2023, it was the revelation that "most" men think regularly about Ancient Rome, to the bemusement of their partners.

I put "most" in quotes because presumably some men are denying that they think about Rome, and therefore not being recorded on TikTok. But as is the way with such things, the ones who do are taken as evidence that all of us do.

Regardless of how prevalent it actually is, the tone in the thinkpieces discussing the meme is of affectionate bemusement at the idea of thinking about Ancient Rome at all. Sometimes it's attributed to toxic masculinity, but overall it seems to be treated as this funny thing that guys do.

Well, I can confirm that I'm also a guy who thinks about Ancient Rome quite a lot. Part of it is patriotic pride: as an Italian, the Roman Empire sometimes feels like the only time we aren't seen as corrupt buffoons or louche aesthetes. In contrast to how Italians are seen now, people think it was full of manly men doing manly things like conquering Britain and, er, slaughtering Germanic tribes (sorry about that, Northern Europeans).

There's an age component to this too. I suspect that popular historians like Antony Beevor owe their entire careers to men like me who've reached the age where it suddenly seems important to know what happened at Stalingrad or during the Punic Wars, and have the financial wherewithal to shell out for five hundred-page tomes that describe them in excruciating detail.

I also like thinking about the parallels between the Late Roman Republic and our own current moment. Rome's transition from a republic, however limited the franchise, to a corrupt and violent despotism wracked by centuries of civil war, is instructive for those of us who don't want to see the US go the same way. Unfortunately, too many other people who think about the Roman Empire a lot actually would like to see the US go down that path. 

I should note right here that I'm not any kind of expert on Ancient Rome. My knowledge of that subject comes, in descending order of how much I've retained, from Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast, Asterix comics, family trips to Rome in the 1980s and 90s, Ridley Scott's Gladiator and Mary Beard's SPQR. I haven't read any primary sources, like Tacitus, Cassius Dio or Suetonius, nor have I made much headway with Stoic philosophy, despite it having had a bit of a moment here in the Silicon Valley in the last decade.

But not being an expert is, to my mind, precisely why it's worthwhile to consider the similarities of Rome's slide into authoritarianism with our own. All you have to do is describe an unequal society, with elites that grew more interested in consolidating their own power than in civic engagement, and you already see the parallels between late-republican Rome and the contemporary US.

It's also not much of a stretch to imagine parallels between certain people in our own era and in theirs. For example, if Donald Trump or Elon Musk had been alive then, it's easy to imagine them earning their riches in much the same way Marcus Crassus did. A member of the First Triumvirate alongside Julius Caesar and Pompey, and the richest man in Rome, Crassus made most of his money through speculative real estate purchases, stakes in silver mines and slave trafficking, but his side hustle really takes the cake. He apparently set up Rome's first fire brigade, but he only put out fires if the owner sold the property to him at a discount. He'd then rent the rebuilt properties back to their original owners.

Leaving aside comparisons to contemporary troublemakers, the story of Crassus, and the ongoing fascination with the Emperors of Rome, comes down to the fact that there are just so many colorful characters. Caligula made his horse a senator; three centuries later Valentinian died of apoplexy after furiously haranguing a diplomatic delegation; in between them Vespasian made light of the tradition of deifying emperors after death, with his last words, "Dear me, I think I'm becoming a god." He died of dysentery.

That said, these characters were able to be colorful because, as emperors, they had unlimited power. They only had unlimited power because Julius Caesar and a number of other generals put their ambition ahead of respecting Rome's rules. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, bringing his armies into Italy, he was doing something that centuries of precedent in Roman law hadn't considered a loyal general might do. When Donald Trump claims, against all evidence, that he's the rightful winner of the 2020 election, he's following a long tradition.

Speaking of Trump, do you know who else is thinking about Ancient Rome? The extreme right. Though they aren't just thinking about Ancient Rome. They also like the Spartans, thanks in part to Zack Snyder's 2007 film 300 and the 1998 comic by Frank Miller from which it is adapted. Comments by both Snyder and Miller seem to refute links to the "clash of civilizations" that was in vogue during those years after 9/11, but many critics have drawn the parallel between the white Spartans and the non-white (and monstrous) Persian army. 

Snyder and Miller aren't the first to portray the Spartans as the Classical equivalent of Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name. That myth goes back to Roman times – which I suppose means that what Roman men thought about several times a day was the Spartans. Historian and fantasy author Myke Cole devoted an entire book, The Bronze Lie, to dismantling this myth of Spartan martial prowess. From what he could tell, the myth seems to come from the fact that Sparta was the only Greek city-state that actually trained for war from time to time.

You sometimes get the sense Cole is tilting at windmills, including when he criticizes the overabundance of the "moron label", as he calls the Molon Labe tattoo that shows up on a lot of Second Amendment activists' arms. Molon Labe being Ancient Greek for "Come and take them", which is what the Spartans apparently said in response to a Persian demand to lay down their arms.

Cole isn't the only writer combating some of the myths that we have about the ancient world. Many scholars push back on the idea that Ancient Greece and Rome were "white", an idea that comes from the Enlightenment. They argue that our conceptions of race wouldn't have made sense to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, whose populations drew from ethnic and cultural groups from all over the Mediterranean. Still, this hasn't deterred White Nationalists, Nazis and other accelerationists from linking the supposed whiteness of the Classical world to Victorian conceptions of Whiteness, which get sanitized into the concept of "Western civilization".

According to Donna Zuckerberg, author of Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (and the sister of one Mark Zuckerberg), the far-right sees Ancient Greece and Rome as racially pure, patriarchal societies that were superior to our own supposedly decadent multiculturalism. The irony is that Rome became even more unstable after it transitioned from a republic to an empire.

The period in which Augustus ruled is held up as one of the golden ages of Rome, and the Empire hit its peak more than a century later under the so-called Five Good Emperors (not all of whom were good, and there weren't five of them). There were several violent transitions in that period, notably 69 AD, the Year of Four Emperors, but Nerva, the first "Good Emperor" was also installed thanks to a coup.

That point gets glossed over because of worse times later: there would be a Year of Five Emperors and a Year of Six Emperors, with pretenders to the throne popping up all over the Empire for the next few centuries. One emperor got the post because the Praetorian Guard murdered his predecessor and then auctioned the throne off to the highest bidder. The reign of Augustus may have ended the chaos of the Late Republic, but its genesis as a murderous power struggle meant that the Empire would always be vulnerable to whichever general or governor could get enough legions to support him.

Despite that, there are still many who fetishize Augustus. A number of personalities at the Claremont Institute, like Donald Trump's former advisor Michael Anton, have floated the idea of a Caesar-like figure, "halfway between monarchy and tyranny", who would be able to pull the US away from what they perceive as everything wrong with the country: wokeness, transgenderism, censorship, etc. The concept is called Caesarism or Red Caesarism.

Augustus has fans beyond extreme rightwing White House advisors. None other than Mark Zuckerberg is said to be a huge fan of the first Emperor, even apparently modeling his haircut on the Roman style sported by Julius Caesar, Augustus, and any number of dapper early Empire gentlemen. In a 2018 interview Zuckerberg mused to the New Yorker that Augustus established world peace "through a really harsh approach". This isn't to imply that Zuckerberg wants to make that tradeoff, but it's a little worrying that the man who gave us the Cambridge Analytica scandal is weighing the pros and cons. Mike Duncan's response to this, when interviewed by Rolling Stone, was to note that this "isn't great. Because just for the record, Augustus was kind of a sociopathic murderer."

The thing that jumps out to me about the whole "thinking about Rome" bit is that, if we're talking analogies, we're probably just at the first stage of the collapse of the Republic, when some of those great generals were finding they enjoyed being dictators. Julius Caesar is famous because of Shakespeare's play, and his ties to Augustus, and the fact that his assassination, instead of ending the crisis, brought it to the point of civil war.

Augustus took advantage of the Roman fear of kings – very much like ours – to call himself "princeps" or first citizen. He wrapped himself up in familiar iconography to assure the Romans that he wasn't doing what he was clearly doing. Crucially, he also managed to stop the wars tearing Rome apart.

However, his taking power ultimately was the start of Rome's chaos, not the end, and it'll be the same if the US falls into Caesarism. That's something worth thinking about three times a day, and not just for men.

RIP Keith Giffen

For the moment I'm still able to find things out on Twitter (yes, I'm still calling it that), and unfortunately, what I found today was an article in the Guardian saying that Keith Giffen, one of my favorite comics creators, had died. He was 70, and had recently suffered a stroke, which I hadn't heard about.

It's hard to overstate the influence Giffen had on me at a formative age. My first encounter with his work was on an issue of Justice League America, which he plotted and co-wrote with JM DeMatteis (who eulogizes him nicely at his own blog). It came as part of a random grab bag of 50 comics that I ordered from one of those ads you used to find in comics back in the 1990s, and featured Guy Gardner arm-wrestling with Kilowog on the cover, while Kilowog used his power ring to tickle Guy's nose.

Not that I knew any of that at the time. All I knew was, this was A Green Lantern, but not THE Green Lantern I knew about (Hal Jordan), and it was funny. When I looked inside, it was even funnier. I was hooked. I'd previously been an X-Men and Marvel acolyte, but I think it's fair to say that's the moment that turned me into a DC fan.

From there I gathered all the back issues of Justice League America, from its start as Justice League to its renaming as Justice League International. That also led me to the Justice League Europe spinoff, and somehow to Volume 4 of Legion of Superheroes, the dystopian Five Years Later era that also served as a foundational document. I also got the Legion of Substitute Heroes Special that he drew and wrote, as well as his Ambush Bug miniseries and the Heckler.

His most immediate influence on me was in my drawing style. I went from trying to emulate Jim Lee's work on X-Men to the Giffen's chins, profiles and squinty eyes. I doubt my copies were any good, but I don't think I've ever been able to shake it. My love for Giffen's style (at that time, because it changed numerous times) also influenced how much I like other artists' work. For example, one reason I like Charlie Adlard, who drew the Walking Dead, is his style's similarity to Giffen's.

The JLA/JLE/JLI run is probably my favorite sustained run in comics ever. Over 60 issues of JLA, the tone changed several times, from a seriousness grounded in 80s comics realism, to the silly comedy that everybody associates with that book, and even to horror in several storylines. It also took a bunch of characters that were, quite frankly, C-listers at best, and turned them into an ensemble with different personalities and tones. I don't know what Guy Gardner was like before JLA, but turning him into a know-nothing fan of Reagan and Stallone was beautifully apt for the time.

Legion of Superheroes is my second-favorite comics run. Like JLA, Giffen didn't script it, but he did draw it for most of the first couple of years, imbuing it with a used-future aesthetic that made the 30th Century feel like a real, lived-in place. While the tone was generally bleak - when it started the Legion was disbanded and Earth was secretly under the control of the Dominators - there was time for some humor, usually whenever Matter-Eater Lad showed up. It was also notably adult: there was violence, drug use, and same-sex relationships, though it never quite tipped over into "Mature Readers" territory.

I was struck by all these things when I reread those books a few years ago (the Justice League being my first port-of-call in the big comics reread). I was also struck, reading the ads for other books DC was publishing, just how many books Giffen was working on. With the exception of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, he seems to have been plotting just about every other DC Universe title between about 1987 and 1991, which is amazing considering that he's not better known outside of comics. Judging by all the off-the-wall references in Ambush Bug, he must have had as good a knowledge of the DCU as Mark Waid, who's famously the most knowledgeable man in comics.

Now, I call myself a Giffen fan, but I didn't keep up with his work much after his JLA and Legion runs ended. I'd kind of moved away from comics by then, and it's been hard to get back into the continuity after so long away. On the other hand, it was fun to see his creation Lobo show up on DCAU shows like Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited.

I do have one final story. Back when the internet was new, and America Online was the way most people accessed it, I was at a friend's house exploring the DC Comics hub on AOL. I found myself in one of the message boards, and who was there but none other than GIFFEN-1. He was very gracious about my requests for him to return to both JLA and Legion, pointing out that Dan Jurgens and Mark Waid were doing a good job (this is true of the latter). I never got to meet him in person at any of the conventions I attended during high school, but this was one of my "I'm not worthy!" moments.

Reading DeMatteis's tribute to Giffen, I need to go check out their JLA followup, Formerly Known as the Justice League, and especially their creator-owned book Hero Squared.

Goodbye, Keith - thanks for the laughs and the tears and the thrills. Luckily I have all the books and can revisit them anytime.

Munich 2023

The final part of my trip was Munich, which I visited on my own. That makes it my first trip abroad without family (either accompanying me or that I was visiting) since before the pandemic. It was also my first time back in Germany since 2012, when I went to a conference for work, and my first time visiting Munich since early 2001, when I went with my friends during my year abroad in Göttingen.

In a lot of ways Munich was the perfect place to go after Rome. It was a little quieter and more orderly after the chaos of Central Rome, and apart from the Marienplatz on my last day it wasn't overrun with tourists. That said, I lucked out in my choice of hotel because it was very centrally located, with most attractions and the main train station easily accessible by U-bahn. Some sights were even reachable on foot, which I also appreciated.

Hohenschwangau, with its eponymously named castle in the background

My first day was taken up by a trip to "Mad" King Ludwig II's castles, just outside Füssen and two hours away from Munich by train. I hadn't gotten to see Neuschwanstein or Hohenschwangau on my previous trip, so I made my plans meticulously, even booking a tour of Hohenschwangau in advance. Neuschwanstein was already booked up, so all I saw of that were a few views from the village below or from the windows of Hohenschwangau castle.

This was also a good counterweight to Rome, since Füssen is pretty small and rural, and the village of Hohenschwangau even more so. It's also right at the foothills of the Alps, so it was inspiring to see the mountains right there, at the other end of the valley. As it turned out, they were actually in Austria, which somehow impressed me even more.

The castle was pretty nice: it's well-maintained since the Wittelsbach family's days in charge, and features frescoes of courtly romances painted on the walls of most of the rooms. You can see a few signs of Ludwig's obsession with the Wagner cycle, but mostly it seems clear that those surroundings are what drove him to that obsession. Overall it's a trip worth taking, but I think I didn't appreciate how much planning would be required for it, since the trains from Munich to there and back are only about one per hour (and the direct ones are every two hours); I ended up walking back down to Füssen from Hohenschwangau after the end of my tour, and catching a train that I needed to change halfway through, and even so I didn't get back to Munich until almost 7pm.

The second day's main attraction was Oktoberfest. I hadn't done it on purpose, but I managed to schedule myself in Munich right in the middle of the festival. I'd always been leery about it, because I'd assumed there'd be enormous crowds all over the city, but as it turned out I needn't have worried. I booked my hotel well in advance (I think even as early as July, soon after I'd bought my flights), and during the days I was there I saw a lot of people, locals and tourists, wearing the traditional lederhosen for men or dirndls for women, but they were mostly gathered at the Wies'n, as the festival is known.

It helped that I arrived in town on a Wednesday and went to Oktoberfest early on Friday afternoon - who knows what the crowds would have been like on Saturday? Entry is free but if you're carrying a large backpack, like mine, you have to pay 5 euros to check it. When I got in, I wandered around the funfair for a bit, but then made my way to the Paulaner tent. I found an empty table at the back and observed for a bit, while also figuring out how to order a beer (which came in a liter glass, of course) and some food. I went for some Weisswurst to start, and then a sort of roast pig with caramelized skin, which was pretty good. But a liter of beer is no joke, and to be honest, I was a bit ruined for the rest of the day, even though that's all I drank.

This is, I think, a good point to mention that drinking liters of beer in Munich is associated with one of my most disgraceful episodes in my year abroad. When my friends and I came over, we weren't around for Oktoberfest (it was January or February), but three of us did go visit the Hofbräuhaus, which is basically the same experience. I'd say one of my friends in particular came to grief, because that night none of us stopped at one liter, but I was just as hungover the next day, thanks to a night spent on the tiles figuratively (i.e. drinking) and literally (i.e. vomiting once we got back to our pension).

Luckily there was none of that this time, though the incident was very prominent in my thoughts when I was sitting on the bench and watching the Germans drink, eat and sing along to DJ Otzi's Hey Baby. I may or may not have sung along when the oompah band played the Wild Rover and John Denver's Take Me Home Country Roads, but there are no witnesses to confirm or deny.

The Residenz at night

My final day was spent visiting the Residenz, where the Wittelsbachs lived in Munich, and then walking back to my hotel via the Englischer Garten. For the former, I hadn't really planned on seeing it but then decided to visit it when I wandered to there from Marienplatz the night before. It's probably a little smaller than Versailles but the older part is easily as glamorous as any royal palace, sumptuously decorated and just crawling with paintings and art. 

A lot of the written descriptions and audio descriptions highlight how much of the palace was destroyed during Allied bombing raids in WWII, which just makes the state of it now more impressive: apart from some conspicuously blank spots where a painting should be, you'd never guess that it had been pounded to rubble nearly 80 years ago.

Apart from the sights, it was quite an experience being back in Germany after so long, and my mind kept going back to my year abroad. I was quite near the university, which helped, because it made parts of that neighborhood look and feel similar to Göttingen back in the day.

It was also interesting seeing the people dressed up for the Wies'n, because it brought home how I was in a different part of Germany than I'd lived in back in 2000-2001. It's possible that Bavarians make a little too much of their dialect and "peculiar" customs - after all, crossing from Niedersachsen, where Göttingen is, to Bavaria isn't like finding yourself in a different country, like when I travelled to Edinburgh from London in 2012. But it's interesting how every official is expected to dress in traditional clothes when Oktoberfest is on, sort of like how American politicians have to wear the US flag lapel pin.

Those three days also brought home how much I love Germany, and continue to do so after that year I spent living there. I don't know that I'd want to live there now (although there are worse places), but it's true that Germany has a special place in my heart, so it was nice to get in touch with that again. In fact, I liked it so much that I'm sort of wondering how I can tack on more visits when I go back to Europe in coming years. After all, I feel like I need to properly see Berlin, and I've never been to Hamburg or Cologne.

Marienplatz from above

Which, of course, is the effect I was hoping for when I booked these days in Munich. After the pandemic and the shelter-in-place orders I needed a spur to get out into the world for some exploring again, and this trip, both the days in Rome and those in Munich have reawakened that in me. And while I'm looking at visiting or revisiting other spots for next year, I'd be happy to go back to both, since both cities feel so big that there were plenty of other sights I could have visited.

Rome 2023

Yesterday I wrote about my experience flying on United's business class, and today I'm going to write about my week in Rome. In a separate post I'll talk about my impressions of the three days I spent in Munich, so you can see I'll be milking this trip for as much content as I can.

The trip to Rome was long overdue, in many ways. I was originally supposed to spend a few days there with my mom last year, as part of my first international trip since the start of the pandemic, but at the last minute my mom caught conjunctivitis and I had to just go straight to Turin for the full three weeks. Also, the last time I'd been to Rome was in 2017, and the time before that was all the way back in 2002, so it was clearly time to spend some time there again.

We used to visit both Rome and Turin every year for our family holidays in the summer, so I have some memories of the place and the sights. I associate it with staying with my grandma at my great-aunt's place, enjoying the large terrace overlooking a quiet residential street just a few metro stops from the touristy center. But all the same, Rome's always felt a little less like my place, because my mom's family is smaller than my dad's and there were never any cousins close to my age. In the years when we were going there regularly, I was also generally too young to venture out on my own, so this was the first time I got to explore Rome on my own.

Piazza Venezia from the Vittoriano

I had a couple of ideas of things I wanted to see, mostly in the round of really touristy things: the Capitoline Museums, the Galleria Borghese, various Roman ruins, and St. Peter's Basilica. I also ruled out a couple of sights, specifically the Colosseum and the Vatican Museums, mainly because I didn't feel like dealing with either the lines or the process for booking them.

(As an aside, trying to book sights online in Rome is brutal: not only are there innumerable fake sites, which tripped us up in 2017 when trying to see the Galleria Borghese, but when you do finally manage to find the legitimate site from the Culture Ministry, it doesn't always work properly)

I was also open to other suggestions, so was happy to go to the Baths of Diocletian with my mom and stepdad on the first day, even though I hadn't been planning to see it (it gets only a short mention in my tiny guidebook), and to check out the Domus Romane at Palazzo Valentini. I'd also gotten myself ready by rewatching Rick Steves' and Stanley Tucci's shows about Rome, though in the end the Rick Steves programs were more of an inspiration.

Bernini's David

Of course the ancient Roman sights dominated my sightseeing, in part because the Forum is just a block or two from my mom's front door. It also helps that the city center is so compact, meaning that most sights are within walking distance of one another. Popping out into the Forum, I could turn one way and walk past the Colosseum, or turn the other way and end up at the Vittoriano, Piazza Venezia and from there make my way to the Pantheon. And just behind the Vittoriano were the Capitoline Museums, which overlook the Forum. The only times I used public transport were when we went to visit my mom's cousin at my great-aunt's old place, and when I took the bus to St. Peter's.

The other thing that made me gravitate toward the Roman sights is, of course, my newfound appreciation for Roman history, thanks to Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast. I've mentioned before that his approach let me put the history of the Roman Empire into its proper context, and that context allowed me to better appreciate the sights in front of me. For example, the Baths of Diocletian had a room featuring inscriptions and tablets from religious rituals taken from pretty much every emperor from Augustus to the start of the Crisis of the Third Century, and knowing the sequence of emperors made it easier to understand the shift from one dynasty to another.

Incidentally, it was around this time that the meme about men thinking about the Roman Empire showed up, so I had it in mind when I was scurrying from sight to sight. I question how accurate a talking point that originated on TikTok could be, but it's true that Ancient Rome has always held a particular fascination for me. As near as I could tell, beyond the usual reasons relating to toxic masculinity (but without minimizing that, basically everything some women say about men on social media boils down to toxic masculinity), Rome is important for Italians because it's the last time we were powerful, rather than characterized as the effete aesthetes of the Renaissance or the corrupt buffoons of the post-WWII period. I certainly don't wish I lived during the Roman Empire, though.

As far as non-Roman sights, the Galleria Borghese and St. Peter's Basilica stuck out for me the most. My mom and I got a tour for the Galleria Borghese, which ended up focusing mostly on the Bernini statues (David, the Rape of Persephone, Apollo chasing Daphne), at the expense of most of the paintings. I may have seen less that way, but I understood a lot more about the statues thanks to our tour guide; the danger of such a sumptuously equipped gallery as the Borghese is that the artwork blurs before your eyes after a while, but the tour made me better appreciate the works that we did focus on.

If I had to pick a standout, though, it'd be St. Peter's. This is one of those sights that you encounter a lot on TV or in photos, but those don't prepare you for the real thing. I made the clever decision to go on a Monday (rather than Sunday, when Mass would have been in session), so it didn't take long to get in. When I did, I could hardly believe my eyes: every square inch, it seemed, was covered in decoration, from the floor to the ceiling. It was so riotous that I missed the artworks that everyone comes to see, like Michelangelo's Pietà - I just couldn't take my eyes off the ceiling.

To put it another way, the only sight that remotely compares, for me, is the Grand Canyon, which takes your breath away whenever you see it. This comparison came into my mind as I made one of several circuits of the church, and was undoubtedly helped by the thought that the alcoves on either side of the main altar were themselves bigger than most churches I've seen in my life. 

I rounded off the trip with a visit up the cupola, which gave me some amazing views of the city - even more amazing, I think, than the ones from the roof of the Vittoriano. I appreciated how there was a bathroom and a cafe midway up, which seems odd to have on the roof of the mightiest church in Christendom, but was undoubtedly welcome, since it was a hot day.

St. Peter's Square from the Cupola

As far as food, I got to try a number of local delicacies, though none of the restaurants mentioned in Stanley Tucci's show. The nice thing about Italy generally, though, is that most restaurants and cafes are just about as good as each other, so if you don't go to one place, the next one you find will also be pretty great. The important thing is that I got to have my pizza al taglio, my supplì, and my bucatini all'amatrician, as well as liberal helpings of ice cream. And all of it was at prices that you don't really find in the Bay Area.

This trip was a nice experience, because as I said, I'd never really been able to explore the city on my own. I don't know if I can cope with the chaos of the neighborhood where my mom has her house, but I felt like I was starting to understand it a bit better by the time I left. Maybe it'll never become my place like Turin or London have, but it was great getting to know the place. And the best part is, it's so saturated with things to see and do that I could probably spend another week there without repeating any of the sights I saw on this trip.