Stories-Essays - Without Borders

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Stories-Essays

A collection of 31 posts

Cultural Differences in Non-Verbal Communication

Cultural Differences in Non-Verbal Communication

When you don't speak the language, you can fall back on body language, right? No. And even if you understand the language, you should familiarize yourself with the following, or you might end up telling your boss "to stick it up their ass," mistakingly inform someone they're getting cheated on,

The Quick Culture Guide for Global Business

The Quick Culture Guide for Global Business

The following guide is for anyone looking to increase cooperation and productivity in a multicultural environment. The ten-minute read is easily translated into multiple languages due to its simple vocabulary and sentence structure. I encourage people to comment, discuss, and learn more about the practical findings by reading Erin Meyer's

February 2023 Collection

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February 2023 Collection

The PDF collections are for those who don't want to strain their eyes. As paid members, you have access to PDFs you can print or read on your Kindle. The collections do not include articles that include video and sound.

Cultural Competence & Story Workshop

Stories-Essays Featured

Cultural Competence & Story Workshop

Throughout February, I hosted an Interintellect series to investigate how to increase cultural competence, better workflow for international business, abate polarization, discover universal truths about morality, advance the bureaucratic system and immigration process, and create a more 'borderless' society. It all came down to stories. Through sharing our stories and

Rekindling the Traveler

Rekindling the Traveler

Excerpt from Living with the In-Laws. Click on the link to purchase the full book (ebook or paperback) on Amazon. Spring, 2015 My acting career (or lack of one) put the traveller in me to sleep. By the time I was three, I had already lived on three continents. My

The Best Podcast Software 2023

The Best Podcast Software 2023

I am not affiliated with Adobe podcasts. I wrote the following so others don't waste the same money and time I did. Since I am not an audio engineer and my podcast recording studio is a closet, I looked for the best way to have clear audio recordings online. From

January & Guiri Comic PDF collection

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Language Learning

January & Guiri Comic PDF collection

How Has Millennial Culture Changed?

How Has Millennial Culture Changed?

In a time before TikTok and even Instagram, peeps would get crunk and holla at biotches who didn't occupy wall street because economic inequality was fo sizzle not as hot as shopping for bling. #MeToo was years away, so dawgs would be all like booyah when white girl-wasted clubbers approached

How to Travel for Self and Community Improvement

How to Travel for Self and Community Improvement

I couldn’t kill a baby. At least, that’s what you tell yourself six hours into your red-eye flight, one of which you spend waiting for the plane to take off and level out so you can recline your chair the 5 degrees that do little to keep your

Does ChatGPT Have Morals?

Does ChatGPT Have Morals?

ChatGPT is natural language processing (NLP) specifically designed to generate human-like text responses within seconds. It can create articles, essays, and even codes that work. And within past the three weeks, it’s responses regarding morality already changed. Nolan: Can we morally accuse a different culture? ChatGPT: It is not

How to Tell Stories for a Worldwide Audience

How to Tell Stories for a Worldwide Audience

How do you tell stories for a worldwide audience? There's no one-size-fits-all solution in a modern, globalized world where storytelling is laden with intertextuality and memetic devices. You need to learn the universal themes and values while honing your craft by studying plot devices and how people speak. But who

December 2022 Collection

Paid-members only

December 2022 Collection

Happy New Year! Here's the December PDF collection for all of you who don't want to strain your eyes. As paid members, you have access to PDFs you can print or read on your Kindle. Please let me know if you have any complaints about the font or anything like

God's Paperwork

God's Paperwork

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy." Kafka. Prologue March 2020 The soul-sucking virus, here known as a bureaucrat, ripped the paper and tore Ana's heart. "Nu pari un român cu adevărat," You don't sound like a proper Romanian, he said loudly enough for

November 2022 Collection

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November 2022 Collection

"I can't stand reading on a computer or phone all day," I say. That's a bit ironic coming from someone trying to create an online community with an independent subscription service. I've skipped out on countless articles because I was no longer in the mood to stare at my phone

Death & Culture

Death & Culture

There's no way to pull me apart from the others. We're held together by what I can only describe as a magnetic force. It's as though our energy has been converted into a meaningless and inevitable task we have no control over. Even my sense of self is disintegrating into

Can We Morally Accuse a Culture?

Can We Morally Accuse a Culture?

"It's our culture" is a common rebuttal when people criticize cultural practices such as eating shark soup, child beauty pageants, swimming with dolphins, bear baiting, eating Fois Gras, binge drinking, Zwarte Piet, bullfighting, child fellatio, female genital mutilation, ritual child sacrifice, attending a Nicki Manaj concert—this list could go

Japanese Food for Thought

Japanese Food for Thought

You don't need to be a cultural psychologist to know that culture influences how you raise a child, create business structures, physically distance yourself, and what you value. But did you know culture influences how you see horizons, your levels of trust, embarassbility, types of mental illnesses you're subject to,

First 5 Episodes: Transcripts + Language Notes

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Language Learning

First 5 Episodes: Transcripts + Language Notes

I launched the first five episodes to give people a better idea about the podcast. Last week, I launched the trailer: Without Borders Trailer 0:00/1:331× And the first episode: An Easier Life in Sri Lanka than the UK Renuke Samarsignhe went from telling servants to pour him

How to Understand Culture & Weird People

Stories-Essays Featured

How to Understand Culture & Weird People

First off, what is culture? Food, traditions, language, and so on, right? Well yeah, but we need a better explanation than that at Without Borders. So, let's get a bit academic here and use Richerson & Boyd's definition. Culture is any information acquired from other members of one's species through social

October Collection PDF

Paid-members only

October Collection PDF

"I can't stand reading on a computer or phone all day," I say. That's a bit ironic coming from someone trying to create an online community with an independent subscription service. I've skipped out on countless articles because I was no longer in the mood to stare at my phone

Screw Plan B, I'm going Balls Deep

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Screw Plan B, I'm going Balls Deep

Social Media Alternatives

Social Media Alternatives

In my last post, "Yuval Noah Harari: Hero and Hypocrite," I ended it with a promise to look into ethical, social media alternatives or ways to change social media. I was immediately overwhelmed and had difficulty tracing back some claims to academic journals and legitimate research. Fortunately, my friend, Dexter

Yuval Noah Harari: Hero and Hypocrite

Yuval Noah Harari: Hero and Hypocrite

"…People who shone at school and don't understand why that hasn't made them happy have Harari." * Helen Lewis. That quote hit home. It has sat with me since August 15th, 2018. No, I don't remember the exact date because I had some life-changing revelation. I just looked it up when

¿Qué es un Guiri?

errores de un guiri

¿Qué es un Guiri?

Soy un guiri. ¿Qué es “guiri?” Un guiri es un extranjero que vive en España. Alguien que pone ketchup en la tortilla, mezcla los verbos estar y ser, deja propinas, busca restaurantes abiertos entre las 15:00 y 20:00, sale al club a las diez, llora en el ayuntamiento,

The Men Who Swallow

The Men Who Swallow

In an expansive valley perched high up on a mountain range in the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea lived Anitelu. Fortunately or unfortunately—depending on how you look at things—Anitelu wasn't living up to his name. Anitelu spent his time weeding, and what was at the time even