at home in…, w| Gerald Zhang-Schmidt

It was the year 1930. My grandmother was far from being my grandmother yet. She was only 8 years old, after all. Her father, a shoemaker, decided to join in the ranks of the many who sought their luck somewhere else - whether because he had fallen on hard times (which wouldn’t be surprising, given the [...]

As an “intellectual going public,” I appear a bit too aloof for some people – but aloofness is necessary to have the distance it takes to see connections hidden by what’s (supposedly) just normal. Thus, even as I enjoy it once I get into talking with people (sometimes, only too much so), I like to [...]

It’s a strange world I’ve been falling into: people who track their life in order to quantify their self, who try to design their ideal lifestyle – and live it, too –, people who aim to be location-independent… and it’s oftentimes the same usual suspects one encounters again and again. Before long, it also tends [...]

For somebody whose “business” the diversity and fascination of this, our world, is, I have a pretty bleak view of much of what passes as traveling. Rather than because of the whole matter of carbon emissions from plane travel, it’s because escapes from this world have come to appear extremely problematic to me.

As part job-seeker in education, part independent scholar, part freelancer, and with a focus on the makings of identity and the interplay between happiness and ecology, I have a particular fascination with the role that location plays. Increasingly, it’s been going in two ways at once: On the one hand, there continues to be a [...]