Israel Stamp Reviews

Last month, having occasion to travel overseas on holiday and seeking to avoid the harsh winter temps of inland Europe, I spent ten nights in Italy. Originally my plan was to stay exclusively in Naples, but on the advice of numerous friends and colleagues I ended up dividing my time between Naples and Rome. I left Israel Saturday, January 10th with my trusted CabinZero backpack and a return flight scheduled for the morning of January 20th. It had been twelve years since the last time I traveled in Italy. In the summer of 2013 I had visited Milan, Turin and Genoa en-route to the French Alps. My phone in those days was a Nokia 5630 ExpressMusic, which sported a 2.2-inch color display and a numeric keypad with joystick. Although smartphones and Google Maps were already a part of the travel experience back then, two apps that figured prominently in this year's travel experience were not: Google Gemini and piXPost . Jerusalem | Vienna | Bratislava | Budapest 2025: Amir Afsai Launch...

Hobby , identity and community are distinct but closely related concepts. The distinction is one of experience: a hobby is a thing we do, an identity is a thing we have, and a community is a thing of which we are a part. The relationship, meanwhile, is one of progression: engaging in a hobby can form part of a person's identity, and people with common identities tend to cling to one another and form communities. Not everyone who collects stamps will identify as a stamp collector, and not everyone who identifies as a stamp collector will join a philatelic community; however, the distance from point A to point B and from point B to point C is shorter now than at any time in the past. What has shortened the distance has been the rise of social media, because social media has increased the visibility of identities and made accessing communities virtually effortless. Case in point: Had it not been for social media -- specifically YouTube, and more specifically Graham Beck's Ex...

The digital revolution of the 1990s introduced an array of challenges to stamp collecting that the hobby is still grappling with today. In particular, email's displacement of snail mail is universally regarded as the original sin from which all subsequent evils flowed. As snail mail, once the primary gateway into the hobby of stamp collecting, slipped further and further into obsolescence in inverse correlation to email's rise, a generation was born into a reality where the very notion of what a stamp is was already fading into obscurity. In the larger context of collecting generally, snail mail's decline was but one early symptom of the shift undergone in our emotional attachment patterns from physical property to digital property. Whereas prior to the digital revolution memories were preserved in physical form and it was fundamentally the physical form that was valued, the new paradigm sees less and less value in the accumulation of physical mementos when their digit...