This day, 7 October, in 2021, during the general debate of the First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly, China and Russia issued a joint statement...
No matter how much we enjoy a thing, it’s not enough; our enjoyment seeks validation.
Imagine a friend gave us a new DVD, but without introducing it. It’s blown us away. What a film! We’ve lingered over the credits, and, well, we’re now just one click away from checking the review on Rotten Tomatoes. But why would we read a review now?
Because we desperately want to see our opinion echoed in a forum higher than our own heads. Secretly, we want to see opinions like ours validated in the highest...
The Stroop Test is a psychological test designed to demonstrate how closely human attention is attracted to the written word.
For adult readers, textual information trumps other forms of visual information, including colour information, in provoking the brain. We could be reading banana written, in purple letters, but the colour we perceive is still yellow, because semantics somehow shout louder.
This affected me while in our new bathroom last month. Naturally, I was wondering what kind of tea I wanted to start the day with, strumming the spectrum of camellia sinensis...
Let’s say that it halves with each cycle. Each consecutive steeping produces half the flavour of the last. With each pouring, the drink more closely resembles water. Eventually, water is all that this drink will have become. The exponential decay curve. Pretty normal.
In fact, this is rather a pessimistic outlook for green tea. There’s drop off, but each infusion surely matches more than 70 percent of the previous infusion. And the observation of today’s Strainer is that, although the taste profile of each infusion worsens as well as the...
Every tea region in China has seen good times and bad times. Lost decades are not unusual in this business. The tea fields of Xinyang City (信阳市) in Guangshan County (光山县), Henan, are no exception.
One dynasty was particularly unkind. Sadly for Xinyang, that dynasty was the Qing, the longest of them all, spanning 1644 to 1912. It’s not that the Qing Emperors didn’t drink tea; the Qian Long emperor specifically wrote about China’s “best” green teas. His omission of Xinyang tea was damning and lasting. Tea production flourished in...
