Fig & Olive

This Ramadan, many of us have decided to give up or decrease our TV and internet usage (especially social media). While we take this time to step back from habits that feel intuitively (bad?) Neil Postman’s, classic 1980’s book on TV may give us reason to continue refraining after Ramadan. The World is Too Much […]

I find some people are turned off by minimalism and somehow believe it is something only the privileged might indulge in. Only the one who has known “the good life” can denounce it. I suppose this assumption is warranted, many of the popular minimalist stories -including the story of The Minimalists, feature people who lived […]

Some time back I read Anne-Marie Slaughter’s excellent essay in The Atlantic, ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have It All‘. It was a much-needed response to the nauseating cry that women in the 21st century, in the West, can ‘have it all‘. The car, the kids, the husband, the education and the career not to mention […]

I’m currently reading Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander and The Undiscovered Mind by John Horgan. The former I’ve read previously and the latter is a new discovery. Jerry Mander makes the point of his book quite clear. Before I began re-reading it -I first read it about two years ago, […]

For better or worse an usually both, our parents affect us. It’s easy to make a political statement in light of this book, fathers matter. And so do mothers but because fathers are more often the ones who abandon than mothers and the one who abandons in Paul Hardings’ book, it is painfully clear that […]

I was looking through my blog categories yesterday to see how I could simplify and get rid of a few. I came across “review” and thought -when have I ever done a review? Here’s one and now here’s another. I picked up the book Long Division: A Novel (also titled ‘Miss Harper Can Do It’) […]