Does your ‘masculinity’ need to seduce me?
‘That one.’ ‘Straight.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Damn.’ I’m sitting in the smoking area of a club. I’m surrounded by a mash-up of oversized shirts, denim, fine-artists, dramatists, bob-cuts, and dope. ‘But he’s coming over.’ Amid empty benches, he sits beside me. I notice o
There has to be more to being than buying
My coworker at the Public Theatre in New York’s Astor Place assured me that this afternoon’s show would be one of the weirder ones. “You don’t know Reverend Billy? Oh this guy’s a real treat. Kind of a crazy East Village legend, but I’m still not really sure if he’s a real reverend or
India, unafraid.
tw: mentions of sexual assault, violence, rape 16th December 2012 – a day that started like any other, but which now marks a turning point in the struggle for women’s rights in India. In South Delhi, 23 year-old physiotherapy intern Jyoti Singh climbed aboard a bus with her male friend. They
Battered Bodhrán
I worked at the Battered Bodhrán on Hackney Road. Six days a week, I’d come in at 7pm and leave shortly after we closed at one in the morning. They paid me seven pounds per hour, which added up to roughly a thousand a month, or nine-fifty after National Insurance. Of that, seven-fifty went on [&h
Has Spotify changed the way we listen to music?
I sit writing this piece to the driving soundscapes of Rival Consoles, a British artist I first came across last year. I’m fairly sure that I discovered him through a Spotify algorithm, most likely a song ‘radio’ manufactured to keep me quietly happy as I focus on something else. All I can rea
Elitism and Traditionalism in Modern Britain
Britain is often heralded as one of the most successful societies in modern human history. We peer out at the world and recoil from the dictatorships and the oppressive regimes that we see, glad that we are not one of them. But British politics has serious problems of its own, and they should not be
Switching Off: The Pleasures of Idleness
Boredom today is the absence of a good 3G signal. I think that it’s worth asking whether or not that ought to be so – whether modern society’s conquest of boredom is something worth celebrating. * Boredom is the feeling we get when our surroundings imprison us – the feeling that there is not
Arrests!
sunday march 17th 1968, grosvenor square and old don came through the coach door like a sack of coal and sat and shook on the front seat wiping hair and blood off his eyes and above, it was glass and steel which is America thakyouverymuch and away through our windows friends in knots struggle
The Battle of Grosvenor Square
On the 17th March 1968, over 80,000 people gathered on Trafalgar Square to protest against the Vietnam war. The Tet offensive had just ended and, unknown to those at the demonstration, the My Lai massacre had occurred the day before. Harold Wilson’s government had managed to keep Britain out o