Columns

The attentive reader might remember that I, foolishly or bravely, have decided to go on a semester abroad in less than three weeks to Madrid, Spain. The preparations have been wonderful. To be fair, that's largely because I have yet to do the heavy lifting, literally, and most of my preparation until now consisted of watching youtube videos and...

The nightmare called 2020 is over and we survived. What a year! I don't know about you, but I think the two things I talked and thought about the most in the past year are Trump and COVID-19. No day passed without me glued to my news app anxiously looking for the next headline, the next crazy Trump tweet or new corona numbers. 2021 seemed...

It's the magic of all new years to create an atmosphere of hope and ambition. A belief that everything will change for the better, that to-do lists will finally be finished and that dreams will come true. 2021 specifically is promising more than any year before it. And so I lie in bed, hitting the snooze button again and again just to hold on a...

At first, it looked like a cyberattack against UM would give 2020 its basic disastrous shape. For most of the world, the coronavirus served that purpose. Yet for me and my colleagues at IDS (Institute for Data Science), the year was colored by a tragedy of our own.  During the fall of 2019, I worked on a grant with a postdoctoral researcher...

His gaze against the sweeping of the bars has grown so weary, it can hold no more. To him, there seem to be a thousand bars and back behind those thousand bars no world. ~ The Panther, Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stanley Appelbaum   I’ve always had an unexplainable love for Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem The Pant...

Last week, for the first time since June, I went away for a few days for work. Upon return, my youngest daughter announced that she was going to place her shoe in front of the chimney. Saint Nicolas is in the country and brings young kids a small gift in their shoe. But for my 11-year-old, it is also still lucrative to believe in Saint Nicolas. ...

I wish I had better news for students with a business and commercial specialisation, but chances are that you’re spending a lot of money on an education for the wrong kind of political economy. On the plus side, you have the dubious honour of being a member of the last generation to be educated in this way. Maybe you can put that on your cv? ...

Corona completely changes my perception of time. I mean, aside from the fact that it's already December even though it feels like yesterday that COVID-19 reached Italy and Europe started paying closer attention to what would become an all-consuming pandemic. On the smallest scale, it changed when I go to bed and wake up, when I eat, when I go t...

It was exactly one week ago when I started my third and last reading for the next tutorial of one of my courses. The topic? Bystanders. The reading? Why and how do we as individuals morally disengage from the atrocities, pain, and suffering in the world, not even lifting a finger to help aside from commenting the praying emoji on a friend's Ins...

Since the start of the pandemic, the number of voice messages I have made and received has increased substantially. They have helped me to keep in touch with family, friends, and colleagues, despite being physically distanced from one another. Moreover, after sitting behind the computer all day, the last thing I want to do is send emails and text m...