The Woman of the Perfume Ad
The woman of the perfume ad is a complex construct. The advertisers who create her are geniuses of manufacturing desire, of finely chiselling models into shape with slogan and sign. Perfume ads come with tropes: her armpits are hairless; no blemish taints her skin; her hair is slicked back with seaw
Did We Get Marie Kondo Wrong?
That manky old jumper doesn’t spark joy anymore? Bin it. What about those trousers you never wore? Chuck them. Those books you meant to read but never did? That essay that made everyone in the tutorial cry in a moment of collective mourning for your failed intellectual potential? What about your a
M&S Mojitos and the Future of Politics
An attempt to gloss over the rape allegations levelled against Julian Assange should have been enough bad press for Diane Abbott in April. It wasn’t, and on a Thursday afternoon she was caught drinking a premixed Marks and Spencer mojito on an overground tube to Stratford. Cue the usual outrage fr
Harder Than Harvard
Whether Harvard actually does discriminate against Asian applicants (it does), and whether repealing affirmative action really will solve that (it won’t), the most notable issue in Asian American politics right now is a fight about who gets into Harvard University. The fight for Asian representati
How one drag queen is confronting Brazil’s far right
“I like to be a boy, I like to be a girl.” Pabllo Vittar doesn’t waste time when it comes to explaining their sexuality: nor should they. The twenty-four-year-old drag queen from Brazil first caught people’s attention performing Whitney Houston’s ‘I Have Nothing’ on local TV. The risky
Shanghainese
I’ll hear a string of sounds – slick fricatives, ballooning rounded vowels, shreds of distantly familiar tones. It’s a sequence of mismatched notes, sewn together by the timbre of my grandma’s voice. She’ll look at me as she speaks, as if trying to impart meaning, to imprint in the air the
From Africa to the Amazon
In an indigenous community in Northern Brazil, I sat with a group of community leaders in a wooden-clad room. I was taking part in a project with Vaga Lume (‘firefly’ in Portuguese), an NGO that works to improve education in roughly a hundred communities in the Brazilian Amazon. In the community
Television Loving Care
“In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer.” That’s how every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer begins. For the uninitiated: Buffy Summers, a sixteen-year-old California schoolgi
O’ahu: regular priced milk and the view over Pearl Harbour
When we arrived in O’ahu we headed for Waikīkī first. From the airport we walked to the Alamo car rental, where my father talked to the desk as my mother sat in the plastic chairs between me and my brother, sobbing as quietly as she could. “We’re safe,” she kept muttering to herself. I