Soqotra: The Evolution of an Alien Island

Give a child a packet of crayons and tell them to draw a fantasy island, and they might well conjure up the Yemeni island of Soqotra.

Act For Afghanistan: Ways to Continue Supporting

Now is not the time to stop reading, talking and thinking about Afghanistan. The situation continues to worsen by the day. So we've put together a few actions that you can take to make sure the wor...

Want to help Afghanistan? The case for buying over donating

The World Bank has ranked Afghanistan, as the 177th easiest country in which to do business with in the world. Unfortunately that was out of 188 economies. Here’s a quick barrage of some more disma...

The Journalism of Things

Every now and then a short video or article pops up on our newsfeed which tells a captivating story about Afghanistan or Syria that has nothing to do with war. For a couple of minutes we are remind...

Handmade - so what?

Once a hipster trend, the desire for handmade goods has become thoroughly mainstream. It can be seen from the meteoric rise of Etsy, right through to proliferation of the word ‘artisan’ on products...

Timbuktu & Back

I remember singing a nursery rhyme about Timbuktu when I was in primary school. I can’t remember what it was now – was it ‘from Kalamazoo to Timbuktu’? – but I remember the images clearly. A fabled...

Timbuktu: A wild story of Myth, Renaissance, Rescue & Ruin

‘I don’t care if you’re in Timbuktu,’ we might say. ‘You’ll be here tomorrow or else!’ Or perhaps, ‘He’s flirted with every girl from here to Timbuktu!’ It means something like God Knows Where, or ...

Can 'crafts' really drive serious economic growth?

Yet we would be wrong to think of crafts as a small sector at the fringes of the global economy. Far from it, crafts are in fact the second largest employer in the developing world, and have a prov...

LET'S WORK IT OUT!

As humans, we crave order. For many, productive work provides this structure. The world around us might be chaotic. But with work we can, at least at times, control what we do in a way we are rarel...

The ultimate sacrifice

[replace_with_featured_image] Fig 1. Babur gardens [source unknown] Fig 2. One of the hospital's where Dr Jerry used to work[source unknown] Whenever we tell people we used to live in Afghanis...

Risk: Sliced, Diced and Sprinkled On Top

As wedding season approaches, we have been getting an increasing number of exasperated customers asking when our most popular glasses will be back in stock again. Well, here's the honest answer – w...

Tradition as Radical

At the beginning of this year, Flore and I found ourselves at the world trade fair for homewares, Maison et Objet in Paris. After a morning of walking through the colossal trade halls we were quite...