Photo Courtesy of Radsfotos on Flickr

I have visited Berlin three times in my life. Each time marked a decade of personal change for me and political change for the city.  In 1988 I arrived in West Berlin, aged 18, on a backpacking trip with a university friend.  I knew a family, friends of my parents, who were stationed in East Berlin as part of the British Foreign Service. The wife picked us up in the West and drove us across the border. Their diplomatic house was large; it had a ping-pong table and pink wallpaper in the bedroom. My friend and I walked after dinner to an almost-empty bar. The few East Berliners stared at us, and the grey interior conformed to my Western image of communism. We only stayed two days, leaving to go south to Italy. The friend and I later fell in love, and then fell out of love, as we drifted through university, slowly losing some of our naivety. Read more »

There are just 3 days left to submit your best travel food photo into our contest (co-sponsored by Food52).  If yours is chosen as the winning photo, you’ll get two free nights at Healdsburg Modern Cottages (with drinks and appetizers for at Barndiva) plus $400 in kitchen products from OXO. To enter, simply email your photo to blogger@tablethotels.com.

From May 28, we will start posting the photos we think should be considered as “finalists”, but you can tell us what you think too.  Click on the “like” button under each vote to register your vote.

Peter McGough and his partner in art David McDermott mark the beginning of the modern world at the outbreak of the First World War, and they’re having nothing to do with any of it. Their dedication to the past is something more than just a retro aesthetic or a backward-looking worldview; it’s somewhere between a lifelong piece of performance art, and a fully realized, semi-private alternative universe. Find out more about its points of intersection with the 21st century at Revel in New York.

Photo Courtesy of Lissette, Fort Lee, NJ

Want to share what you’re seeing? Send us a photo and say where it is. We’ll pick one each week and ask your fellow Global Nomads to guess where. The winner receives a free copy of our Tablet 10 Magazine.

Where is this week’s photograph?

Hadron Collider Photo Courtesy of Image Editor on Flickr

We’re suckers for a good photo of the Large Hadron Collider. But last week began with big news from its older American cousin, the Tevatron, at Fermilab in Illinois. The implications are a bit esoteric if you’re not up to speed on the standard model of particle physics, but the basic result is this: the collisions produce an elusive and short-lived particle called the B-meson, which seems to oscillate between matter and antimatter states, before decaying into particles that can be detected by the Tevatron  — and it shows a slight tendency to decay into particles of matter more often than particles of antimatter.

Science, these days, is often a question of statistics, and it’s this small irregularity which raises big questions for the standard model. The New York Times, in an oddly philosophical unsigned editorial, summed it up pithily: “Why is there something instead of nothing?” Why, in other words, didn’t the Big Bang produce equal quantities of matter and antimatter — which, in such close quarters, might have entirely destroyed each other.

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Photo Courtesy of Albany Tim on Flickr

I love destination art. Don’t get me wrong — I also love those brown-bag lunch lectures at MoMA. But like a middle school crush, great art is more exciting when there’s a chase. Recently this involved a quickie road trip from Manhattan to two dynamo museums in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, just a few hours north.

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