A LONG WAY FROM UTOPIA: PLANNING CITIES WITHOUT THE CITIZEN

It seemed that we had conceded the last of our utopian pretensions in the 1970s. The tradition that began with Plato’s Republic (c. 360 BC) and found a name in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) appeared to come to an end with the failed experiments of Brasilia and Chandigarh – cities designed for a modernity that most of [...]

WHY MEETINGS ARE RUBBISH AND A LOT LIKE BLOOD TESTS

You have a throbbing head ache. You might be a little blind, perhaps white spots are appearing in front of your eyes. Maybe you even feel nauseous. Your overriding desire is to get as far away as possible. Yes, that’s right: you have just got out of a meeting. I wish I could say that [...]

GROWING UP WITH CHILDREN’S STORIES

John Logan’s new play Peter and Alice imagines a meeting between Peter Davies and Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the erstwhile children who inspired the stories of Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. Watching it reminded me how many ‘children’s stories’ are in fact the story of growing up. Childhood, a byword for nostalgia and sun-drenched, sepia-tinted [...]

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QPR AND THE PROSPECT OF ELATION, OR, SITTING ON TRAINS ALONE

Note: Since this article was written, Queens Park Rangers have been relegated from the Premiership. “Hey, bud. I’ve decided next year I want you to teach me about football, watching football on TV. Show me the schedule, I want your team to be my team. Next year, teach me all about watchin’ football. I want [...]

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WAYS OF WRITING—A PERSONAL COMPARISON

…I will now claim–until dispossessed–that I was the first person in the world to apply the typewriter to literature…The early machine was full of caprices, full of defects–devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so [...]

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THE QUEEN OF PARADOX

Human affairs…in which nearly everything is paradoxical. —Emmanuel Kant The media frenzy fizzled, patriotic sentiment defused, nostalgia negated—we can now explore the divided opinion and split interpretation of R.I.P Margaret Thatcher. Whether that is ‘rest in peace’ or ‘rust in peace,’ as some protesters shouted, is hard to determine. “Margaret Thatcher was the best Prime [...]

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ONLINE PROTEST: TROLL-DODGING AND DETACHMENT

Activism has never been e-asier. Going are the days of frostbitten picket lines, of lying prostrate in front of impending [...]

KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON: ACCEPTING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION

I have, recently, been trying to understand the concept of a ‘meme.’ Its only necessary characteristic seems to be the [...]

MY BODY IS A PRISON—GET ME OUT OF HERE

This month has seen the end of what was a rather laborious cancer scare. Hearing the news that I was [...]

‘UNPATH’D WATERS, UNDREAM’D SHORES’: LONGING FOR WATER

“Searching my heart for its true sorrow,   This is the thing I find to be:       That I am weary [...]

TWO PACKETS OF CRISPS: A READER’S RESPONSE TO NIKO MUNZ

Munz certainly captures that ‘thing’ about a song: the delicious paradoxes of timelessness yet temporal specificity of a track, its [...]

MUSIC, REPETITION, AND MEMORY: ON DISCOVERING AND RE-DISCOVERING A TUNE

The consumption of music is an odd process. In particular, the moment when a song is stumbled upon and something [...]