Zoe Strimpel

1 week ago | yahoo.com | Zoe Strimpel

What were you doing when you heard the news of the killing of George Floyd, at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, five years ago today? This question has entered the lexicon alongside the death of Princess Diana and 9/11. In parts of the US, Floyd has been effectively canonised. Minneapolis, for instance, has a George Floyd Square with a giant sculpture of a raised fist in its centre. In some ways, the effects of Floyd’s death have been just as seismic as 9/11. Possibly more.

1 week ago | telegraph.co.uk | Zoe Strimpel

1 week ago | thespectator.com | Zoe Strimpel

When I lived in Berlin a decade ago, I was struck by the contrast between the dullness of young Germans and the incredible weirdness of everything else. Only in German could the word for “gums” (Zahnfleisch) mean “toothflesh.” And only in fleisch-mad Germany (the word for “meat” is the same as “flesh,” which is somehow incredibly disgusting) would people snack on raw pork, a dish known as mett.

2 weeks ago | spectator.co.uk | Zoe Strimpel

My friend recently told me about a young Chinese woman who was staying with them and kept tittering to herself. Asked what she was finding so funny, the answers were telling. In one case, it was because she had seen so many people lounging in parks that she had assumed the working day had been cancelled from on high – and was amused to find out it was a normal weekday. Then there was the way that all the shops and cafés were shut by 9 p.m. Again, the private merriment.

2 weeks ago | yahoo.com | Zoe Strimpel

No matter how many times I look at them, it’s always the same: the sense of shock and disgust that something so truly hideous, so purely monstrous, could stalk the earth, and even worse, could begin with alarming frequency to stalk the waters around my childhood home of northern Massachusetts. No longer just the menace of beaches Down Under, the great whites are actually coming for us all. The marine research group Ocearch has even predicted their arrival on English beaches.