I almost missed my post-op checkup. I didn’t sleep. Had to get up early. Tube strike day. Looked at Uber. £67. 15 mins to arrive. 2.5 hours to hospital. Nope. Have to try public transport. Got to Redbridge station. Next train 15 mins. Almost didn’t get on, stuffed. Aggressive man. Was going to switch onto… Continue reading A London strike in rainy June
18 September 2018. I still remember the exact day I took my one-way flight to Berlin. The place I had decided, at the age of 22, was to be my home. Intoxicated with the city I had visited many times before, I couldn’t wait to jump in head-first. The city already had its hooks in… Continue reading A Palestinian girl’s goodbye to Berlin
Over the weekend, a few of us indulged in a stretched-out debate. It started when one friend explained how she didn’t have the same conversations with her coworkers on the media and politics as she could in university. For her, environment mattered when it came to having intellectual discussions, which she found existed superfluously in… Continue reading An Oxbridge education doesn’t automatically make you an intellectual
Three young Claphamites walk into a bar. The start of a bad joke, and also the start of this article. Three young Claphamites walk into a bar, pay the best part of a tenner for a pint of lager, before climbing the back stairs to a dingy room to take their seats for the show.… Continue reading From spleen to screen — what is comedy now?
They found her by mistake — a life sealed away in cardboard and dust, as though she’d slipped herself into the margins of the world and trusted time itself to stumble upon her one day. Inside that storage locker were hundreds of rolls of film, some never touched by light, as if she believed certain… Continue reading Vivian Maier and the art of being seen
Gorgias (483–375 BCE) wrote his Encomium of Helen (“in praise of Helen”) as a sort of exercise in the use of language, an example piece, if you will, to attract potential students of rhetoric. We might classify it, in Aristotelian terms, as an epideictic, a “praise and blame” piece of writing. Jean Cocteau, whose treatment… Continue reading Poetry on trial — reading Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus in the light of Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen
Every day, people open their phones and step into refugee camps, protests, weddings and war zones thousands of miles away. These glimpses, intimate and unfiltered, are becoming the new currency of global influence. After 7 October 2023, Shayma Ahmed began documenting daily life amid airstrikes, explaining the strain of ordinary tasks and moments of quiet… Continue reading Where everyone can shape the story — the new soft power
The study of memory is an ever-evolving field, having to constantly negate the reinforcement of antagonisms. Various modes of memory study have developed in recent history, most notably the “cosmopolitan mode” which emerged after the Second World War, which focused on individual victims and subsequently neglected the social and political causes of events, resulting in… Continue reading Comparing memories and legacies of the Troubles and the Algerian War
The world shrinks when you dive into the sea. Air loses its meaning and all that exists is the rhythm of your breathing in another universe. Everything becomes slower, denser and time itself seems to stop. In a world that moves too fast, where news lasts for minutes, conversations seconds and screens never rest, diving… Continue reading Breathing underwater — when the sea forces us to slow down
In 1954, Algeria held a unique place in France’s national psyche, being both part of France and something totally barbarous or alien. Considered French territory, yet filled with Arabs who, in French eyes, were not French. Those not of the Gallic ethnicity were the majority Arab population. According to the elite in Paris, they were… Continue reading The ghosts of Algiers
