Taras Shevchenko — Evening Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861) is Ukraine’s national poet. He was one of the first to write in Ukrainian and was also a renowned painter. Here is one of his shorter poems from his first collection of poetry. Evening The cherry orchard is by the cottage May bugs hum over the cherries Ploughmen walk…

And how to use the copula — A while ago, I wrote an article on irregular verbs in Irish, saving the verb ‘to be’ for its own article. I now present the long-awaited sequel. Now, there are three important things to pay attention to with Irish verb conjugations: The form The particles The usage #3 is where…

If you’re thinking: ‘what else can I do?’ — My favorite part about the Disney films that have come out since Frozen is that they feel like love letters to the cultures they are based on. Classic Disney gave us traditional European stories and styles romanticized into a standard canon: modern Disney is expanding its horizons. …

It’s all about your Quidditch position — Those of us who never got our Hogwarts letters (those massive post-owl strikes of the early 2000s caused no end of disappointment!) have a natural curiosity to know which house we would have been sorted into. Would we have spent our free time in the Gryffindor tower or puzzling over…

Don’t cancel Christmas — I’ve been pleased in recent years to see that Love, Actually is getting the backlash it has always been asking for. A few years have given away the secret: it’s a terrible, sexist, gross, and uninspiring movie that should simply never have been made. Not a moment too soon. But…

A poem — Nights by Kilkenny the storm called to me My lover, all mine, my sole twisting rhyme You wanted me wild, untoward and threadbare In the wind’s hungry roar is all understood The parts of our hearts that get lost in the wood The people we are when nobody’s there The souls that we…

Can we switch over already? — In most languages, learning the names for the months is easy, and boring: local variants of the words Romans used, a list of gods, holidays, and emperors followed by numbers that aren’t even accurate. Come on, guys. We haven’t worshipped Roman gods or paid tribute to their emperors for like…

But I’m not sure I’d go back — My Experience I’ve never been much of a ‘people person’. Rather, I’m a ‘place person’. There are certain places that are written on my heart — places that feel like some version of ‘home’. I love them. Antigua Guatemala is one of those places. I honestly think it is one of the…

10 must-see sights for opera lovers — If you’re an opera lover and planning a visit to the Eternal City (perhaps as coronavirus restrictions fade out), a Rome aficionado wondering what songs you can associate with your favorite buildings, or neither and neither but looking to learn, this article is for you! I went into this article…