Category: The Margin
What I learnt from a Grab driver in Bangkok
Bangkok night does not ease you in gently. It arrives all at once. The expressway from the airport is elevated, so you see the city before you are inside it. Lights in every direction. Dense and continuous, like the city never decided where to stop. I had been travelling for roughly fifteen hours. I opened…
Fujifilm Instax Mini review: Beautiful camera, Terrible odds
The Fujifilm Instax Mini does something in the first thirty seconds that almost nothing does anymore. It makes you feel something before you have even used it. The box opens cleanly. The camera sits there looking like it was designed by someone who genuinely cared about the details. Small, solid, slightly retro. The kind of…
After Twenty Years by O. Henry: the promise both of them Kept
After Twenty Years by O. Henry is told in less than a thousand words. It contains three scenes, two twists, one note, and four words that do more work than most novels manage in three hundred pages. Those four words are: Somehow I couldn’t do it myself. Everything the story is about lives in that…
A Horse and Two Goats by RK Narayan: the funniest sad story ever written
A Horse and Two Goats by RK Narayan is the only story on this list that will make you laugh. It will also, if you sit with it long enough, make you feel something considerably more complicated than laughter. This is what Narayan does. He finds the comedy in the gap between people and then,…
The 5 Best AI Chatbots for Building a Website for Free
Building a website with AI is now something any person can do in a single afternoon, with zero coding knowledge and nothing but a free chatbot account. That era is over. You can now describe a website in plain English, paste it into a free AI chatbot, and watch it generate real working code in…
What I learnt from a support dog in Scotland
What I learnt from Louie, a missing dog in Scotland, I only understood when three strangers walked out of the dark toward a fire I had built for no reason at all. That is the thing about spending five days alone in a valley with no signal and nothing to do. By the time something…
Kabuliwala by Rabindranath Tagore: the story about two fathers and one lost daughter
Kabuliwala by Rabindranath Tagore begins with a little girl who cannot stop talking. Mini is five years old. She has been talking since she learned how. Her mother loses patience with the chatter. Her father never does. He finds her silence, when it occasionally arrives, unbearable. This detail matters. Remember it. Because the story is…
What I learnt from a teenage boat skipper in Montenegro
What I learnt from a Teenager with a boat in Montenegro is something that might come as a huge shock to a lot of people. It is all true, lived experience though, and should not be taken as a fictional story, fabricated to tarnish the reputation of a race, country or religion. Last summer in…
The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant: the last line that changes everything
The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant was published in 1884. It takes about fifteen minutes to read. The last line takes considerably longer to recover from. You will know it when you get there. Most people put the story down for a moment afterward. Not because they did not see it coming. Because somewhere underneath…
What I learnt from a bus driver in Scotland
What I learnt from a bus driver in Scotland was not something I had packed for, and I had packed for almost everything. Four large bottles of insect repellent. Three face nets in different sizes. Sunglasses. One bottle of water. A tent I had never pitched alone. A backpack that weighed roughly as much as…
