Thought
Fresh takes on fringe thoughts and compelling contemplations
The English Were Never Alone: Why Translation Mattered To Your Favourite Authors
‘The translator is almost more important to me than the author,’ says Linda Mohamed, a fiction commissioning editor at Faber…
The Quest for Open Access: Control in Public Institutions & Why It Matters
There are many treasures – both academic and artistic – kept well out of reach of the public, often for opaque reasons…
Rebel Yell! What If We Put More Clothes On?
Up and down on public escalators my eyes flicker over endlessly supine forms, repeated with the shoving insistence of propaganda…
Guest Stars: The Influence of Fleeting Friendship
Life seldom adheres to order, especially in the theatre…
Rebel Yell! What Are You Thinking?
Fast thinking Gets Things Done. But it is also the mental equivalent of jumping from cloud to cloud, going through never-ending levels of a video game that can only lead to the grave…
The Crafty Arts of Chromatic Selling & Subliminal Messaging
We see a multitude of cavalcading colour everywhere, and nobody knows how to use it better than marketing gurus...
Rebel Yell! What If We're Wrong About Progress?
Humans are untrustworthy, we’re told. Biased. Liars. Mistake-makers. But the answer is not better education. It’s ‘outsource to technology’…
Psychopaths, Closer Than You Think
The popular perception of a psychopath might still be the knife-wielding maniac, but Hare has challenged this view with his study of corporate psychopathy…
Face Off: The Invisible Enemy
London is the most surveilled city in the world after Beijing, and proportionally to population size, the UK has as many surveillance cameras as China…
The Sound of Secrecy: What's So Appealing about Vinyl?
Music is being exploited, used as a decoy to manipulate us. What becomes your ‘favourite’ song will be guided by tech giants if you let them...
Undressing the Mistress: On Other Women and Etymology
Humans are fallible, sometimes they cheat. And though they do a fair amount of cheating the mundane – taxes, say, or maths tests – they also cheat their partners…
Green Eyes: Myths, Migration and Melanin
But why did green eyes become considered as specifically mystical? One probable explanation is that they are so rare: less than two percent of the world’s population are estimated to have green eyes...
The Secret Life of Housewives & Heinz Tomato Soup
As innocent as the can of soup – that staple of your cupboard; holy grail of the lazy; ever-lurking shadow on the supermarket shelf – is the housewife…
When Right is Right but Left is Wrong
Throughout history the terms for ‘right’ and ‘left’ have been used not only for direction or location, but also to convey moral standing or competence...