Bee Wilson

‘It’s hard to explain​ what it’s like to have a film corporation for a parent, but when my father died, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer more or less adopted me,’ Judy Garland once said. To get a tiny idea of the strangeness of her position, watch the recording made in 1937 of the 14-year-old Garland with a sweet, rounded face and kiss curls singing ‘You Made Me Love...

When​ he was nineteen or so, Al Pacino was taking acting lessons at the Herbert Berghof Studio on Sixth Avenue in New York while earning a living (just about) as a cleaner, busboy and removals man. At night, he sometimes took to the streets to declaim Shakespeare soliloquies, freed by the thought that he needed no one’s permission to play ‘Prospero, Falstaff, Shylock or...

Fridges​ are boxes in which we put food and forget about it. That is both their wonder and their defect. The Italian sociologist Girolamo Sineri claimed that the act of preserving food is ‘anxiety in its purest form’. The domestic refrigerator allows us to shed much of that anxiety or to transform it into the guilt that comes from scraping yet another bag of slimy, uneaten...

‘Things being as they are,’ the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson wrote in her 1971 essay ‘A Defence of Abortion’, two years before Roe v. Wade, ‘there isn’t much a woman can safely do to abort herself. So the question asked is what a third party may do.’ By third parties, Thomson meant abortionists. In her essay Thomson compared the situation of a...

At​ Elizabeth Taylor’s funeral – which started fifteen minutes late, in deference to her own habitual lateness – Colin Farrell recited ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the last two years of her life, when he was in his thirties and she was in her late seventies, Farrell had become one of Taylor’s closest friends. They met...