Icon of the Week: Daniel Lloyd BCyA, Founder of Markers for Mindfulness
“I know what it’s like not having enough paper to colour things in and bring drawings home for my mum to put on the fridge.” This is one of the first things Daniel shares with me. We’re sitting in his room, the window slightly ajar. He’s sipping a hot chocolate while I drain the coffee [&h
Who’s Afraid of Music?
“Against music – for architecture”, proclaimed Salvador Dalí in his 1942 autobiography, a statement that received frustratingly little elaboration from the surrealist. Dalí was an outspoken and often self-contradictory man, for whom shock was often the desired response to his statements. How
The First Last Words of Fyodor Dostoevsky
“ ‘It was just a minute before the execution,’ began the prince, readily, carried away by the recollection and evidently forgetting everything else in a moment, ‘just at the instant when he stepped off the ladder on to the scaffold. He happened to look in my direction: I saw his eyes and und
The Athletic Artistry of Wrestling
Philosopher and essayist Roland Barthes likened it to the theatre of antiquity and the plays of Racine and Molière. Record producer Rick Rubin called it “storytelling taken to the next level”. To someone with little or limited knowledge of it, it might at first appear odd to hear poeti
In Conversation With: Bob Boilen, Founder of Tiny Desk Concerts
“It is very difficult indeed to go anywhere in the world … where people haven’t heard about and watched Tiny Desk Concerts. This is the very definition of a global phenomenon”, read a note to staff from NPR earlier this year. The series of musical performances behind an NPR office des
Alone in the House
No, I hadn’t left the downstairs light on. Had I? I hang a few paces outside my doorway. Before this I was stewing in my bedroom. I could have been doing a million other things than rolling around on my bed, intermittently swapping phone, book and laptop between my hands, wondering if this was wha
Icons of the Week: Katie Stamp and Jakub Trybull, Creators of A Bear’s Favour
A Bear’s Favour (niedźwiedzia przysługa) is a work-in-progress documentary made by six students from the University of Oxford, who sought to unpick the political climate in Poland. Since the fall of Communism in 1989, post-communist prosperity and living conditions drastically improved. In 2018,
In conversation with: Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
“I write the thing I think is best, not the thing I think will please the most people.” When my friend gifted me a copy of Maggie Nelson’s bestseller The Argonauts for my birthday, I mentally placed it onto my ‘to read’ pile. It was a hot summer’s day, and frankly, I wasn’t quit