Jenny Turner

‘The mycological turn’ is a phrase coined ‘half-jokingly’ by Natalia Cecire and Samuel Solomon in an essay published last year in Critical Inquiry. It refers to ‘an enthusiasm for fungi in the various registers of engineering, business, art, medicine and wellness, and popular culture’: a fascination with the material properties of these strange organisms...

Suppose​ a friend you trust more than any other, who taught you the meaning of friendship, lets you down suddenly, and then persistently ceases to fulfil the expectations you have come to have of them. Would you give up all your friends? Would you simply avoid that particular friend? Would you try to have it out, which probably wouldn’t work, but would, if you held your nerve, change...

Fringe meetings​ at Labour Party Conference can serve different functions. People use them for networking, to swap business cards, pick up tips: the lifelong Labour supporter and the loyally Labour energy company executive both come by the Harland & Wolff business breakfast to take a look. People use them to drop in and out of, foraging for food and freebies. The PolicyMogul canvas tote...

In June​ 2021, shortly after she was kicked off Twitter, Naomi Wolf gave an interview to Rosie Kinchen of the Sunday Times. ‘She is increasingly out on a limb,’ Kinchen observed, listing Wolf’s top topics of the time, the anti-lockdown stuff and the anti-masking and the terror of ‘vaccine passports’, and noting that she had just appeared on Steve Bannon’s...

After​ the death of his mother, a man called Beeklam turns to collecting statues, which he keeps in the flooded basement of his house in Amsterdam. Thelma, he calls one specimen – it was his mother’s name. Others are Rosalind, Diane, Magdalena, Gertrud, after his mother’s friends. Because the basement, ‘like the sewers’, is connected to the sea, ‘it was a...