Fear. An entirely intelligible response to a hegemonic culture with substantial overlap with your own: fear that your culture will be assimilated into the hegemon, that the country will become unrecognisable to you, that the virtues you are familiar with and have come to cherish will be eroded. That you will cease being you, and […]
Mahler is not Schoenberg, and Mahler is not Webern, and Mahler is not Pierre fricking Boulez. He’s still solidly in the Common practice period, and his music is full of “vernacular music” catches, which make his music quite approachable. The marches, the dirges, the ländler, the lieder. But Mahler isn’t Johann Strauss either (despite his […]
Sierra Spaulding, I’m taking it from here: On smelly things: the evolutionary account I’ve seen is, to transmit smells of interest back to the den, to keep the other canines informed. All interpretations of dogs as wolves in dens, of course, you should read with caution. And the answers to Why do dogs sniff the […]
Will Lesbians and Gays go extinct/ become even more rare as they become more accepted? No. As other, non-straight respondents have explained. What is at some risk of going extinct is queerness as sexual dissidence. Hard to be a dissident when noone cares about your sexuality. Answered 2016-09-09 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Will-lesbians-and-gay-men-go-extinct-become-even-more-rare-as-they-become-more-accepted/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
You know, I don’t exactly know why my uncle George migrated from a village in Cyprus to Sale, Victoria in 1947, to work as a carpenter in the post-war boom. I can pretty much guess though: family with seven kids, of which he was the eldest; in economic hardship; limited opportunities for work; and the […]
Three answers. When I left for the States in ’99, I did a farewell tour of my friends in Melbourne. One of the last was Russian Maria. (That’s what I called her behind her back, to differentiate her from my friend Croatian Marija, or my sister’s friend Greek Maria.) (Maria was in fact from Kharkov, […]
People are very, very used to pseudonymity on the Internet. Pseudonymy is the norm on bulletin boards and blog comments, and it’s pretty common with blogs too. This is not just cowardice or trollery; this is actually a cultural norm. One I noticed in the blogs whose comment section I’d frequent—especially how people I developed […]
My Russian is rudimentary. I was a PhD student. There was another PhD student, from Moscow. She was a single mum. She did not want any unwelcome attention, so she went with the cover story that she was married, and the fella was back in Moscow. I did IT oddjobs in the department. In fact, […]
Permit me, Quorans, to introduce an Antipodean personality into this thread of woe. Permit me also to try and comprehend why we have this annoyance for no (or least no rational) reason. I mean, if you’re not from Australia, this chap looks unexceptional, doesn’t he? Raffishly unkempt, perhaps. Glasses; he could be studious! A computer […]
The question Assuming age, distance, and current relationship status weren’t an issue, who are some Quora users you could see yourself dating? turned into quite the love-in. You may be helped to make sense of this by such postings as: Robert Todd’s answer to Assuming age, distance, and current relationship status weren’t an issue, who […]