The Aesthetics of Nostalgia
A man in a voluminous fur coat riding a child’s scooter rolls towards the camera in slow motion. Behind him, a crowd of people decked out in hipster kitsch follow on bicycles, rollerblades, and rolling office chairs. This is the opening shot of the music video for ‘Thrift Shop’, Macklemore &am
Keeping House
Left alone in my mother’s house, I clean: clear dishes, fill the washer, measure soap. Its humming fills the kitchen and I hunt for silver polish to clean now-tarnished spoons that someone gave her on her wedding day. There’s so much to do but not enough to make me stop (thinking of you) aaaaaaa
Extreme Education: Inside the South Korean School System
Late at night, Seoul’s backstreets are the domain of more than just the homeless and the drunk. In most cities these particular nightwalkers would be an unfamiliar sight. From 10pm until the early morning children and teenagers can be spotted shuffling home, still in their school uniforms laden wi
Power Play: Vučić, Serbia and the West
On a Saturday afternoon in July 2008, Aleksandar Vučić organized a demonstration in Belgrade.15 000 nationalists attended, a small crowd by Serbian standards. They were protesting against the arrest and extradition of Radovan Karadžić, a former Bosnian Serb politician implicated in the Serbian g
E is for England
‘Englishness’ is a term that has grown as flat as our beer, and as meaningless as our national anthem.‘Englishness’ is something to be rolled out every four years for the World Cup in order to sell Mars Bars and Gillette Razors. It has been appropriated by the sort of people that think the p
Great British Walks: Didcot Power Station
If you have every travelled via the South-West Trains service from Oxford to Reading, you will, most likely, recall seeing the three cooling towers of Didcot power station rising out of the landscape, roughly fifteen minutes into the journey. Clumped together among a shoal of smaller administrative
School Days
They call in my mother because I don’t know how to read. She sits stiffly on a chair, ready to spring. She smells like cigarettes and perfume to cover up the cigarettes. Smoking kills. “We’re concerned about Melanie’s reading,” says the Principal. She’s also sitting stiffly on her chair,
Literary Graves
“You know what was written on Keats’ grave? ‘Here lies one whose fame was writ in water.’” Bob Dylan mulls this over. “Where’s he buried?” Dylan is with Allen Ginsberg, visiting Jack Kerouac’s grave in Massachusetts. Ginsberg asks what graves the singer has seen. A pause. “Victor
Soumission by Houellebecq: Satire or Smut?
France has a history of producing bitterly controversial writers: Baudelaire the Sapphic Pornographer, Celine the traitorous Anti-Semite, and Derrida the Obfuscator. Today, that great tradition is embodied in slight, ailing frame of Michel Houellebecq, who is quite possibly the most controversial wr