Travellers Through Time: A Gypsy History
Romany Gypsies have been variously portrayed as exotic strangers or as crude, violent delinquents; Jeremy Harte vividly portrays the hardships of the travelling life, the skills of woodland crafts, the colourful artistic traditions, the mysteries of a lost language and the flamboyant displays of weddings and funerals, which are all still present in this secretive […]
V: A Celebration of the Vulva and Vagina
Florence Schechter, creator of the world’s first Vagina Museum, is here to take you on a journey towards celebrating, understanding, and appreciating your (or someone else’s) vagina. And once you set off, you’ll never look back. She wants you to be ready to talk about the vulva shame-free, to discover art that admires the vulva and […]
The Humanist Movement in Modern Britain
Humanists have been a major force in British life since the turn of the 20th century. Developing through the Ethical Union (1896), the Rationalist Press Association (1899), the British Humanist Association (1963) and Humanists UK (2017), Humanists sought to reduce religious privilege but increase humanitarian compassion and human rights. After pioneering legislation on blasphemy laws, […]
Art and Artificial Intelligence
In June 2022, Cosmopolitan revealed its cover for its AI issue. The image was generated by an artificial intelligence app and ‘Only took twenty seconds.’ The excitement about the possibilities of AI creativity became balanced with the ethical and creative concerns about how these images are generated and what it means for the future of […]
Tony Robinson Meets Peter Frankopan
Rich soil and bumper harvests have built empires. Drought and famine have fanned the flames of war and rebellion. Storms and floods, earthquakes and eruptions have buried civilisations. The way that humans have interacted with the natural world and with the climate has shaped and will change our world – but this story has gone […]
Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History
In 2020, statues across the world were pulled down in an extraordinary wave of global iconoclasm. From the United States and the United Kingdom to Canada, South Africa, the Caribbean, India, Bangladesh, and New Zealand, Black Lives Matter protests defaced and hauled down statues of slaveholders, Confederates, and imperialists. Edward Colston was hurled into the […]
Terry castle: Some Mortifications of Family history
Terry Castle reflects on the life of her first cousin at four removes, Henry Francis Finn (1852-1924), who led a celebrated cavalry charge against the dervishes of Sudan at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, one of the most grotesquely lopsided and horrific battles in military history. Terry Castle has taught at Stanford since 1983. […]
Clair Wills: How to Plot an Abortion
Following the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and other challenges to reproductive rights, Clair Wills considers the stories we tell about abortion – in fiction, film, court rulings and clinics. Clair Wills teaches at Cambridge. Her books include Lovers and Strangers, an immigrant history of postwar Britain. She is finishing a […]
William Davies: The Reaction Economy
Reactions – facial expressions, gestures or emojis – are the main currency of the digital public sphere. Ubiquitous surveillance and smartphones have made the spontaneous reaction a thing to be cultivated, collected and stored. How did we come to endow reaction with such significance, and what might an escape from the reaction economy look like? […]