Diary: Epistemic Injustice

Bernadette Wren, 2 December 2021

If a whistle-blowing report on the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic was needed, I wish I’d written it myself. It would have highlighted the isolation of a group of conscientious...

Read more about Diary: Epistemic Injustice

What does Fluffy think? Pets with Benefits

Amia Srinivasan, 7 October 2021

Do we really know nothing of how animals, even animals as physiologically different from us as lizards or bats, feel about the burning of their forests, the melting of their ice floes, the contamination...

Read more about What does Fluffy think? Pets with Benefits

People Like You: In Burnley

David Edgar, 23 September 2021

Mike Makin-Waite​, a militant anti-fascist, was working for the borough council in Burnley when, after riots in the town in 2001, it became a stronghold of the British National Party. On...

Read more about People Like You: In Burnley

Ghosting: Dead to the World

Hal Foster, 29 July 2021

Law drops the missing person once his case is closed by return or death, but myth and literature can follow him in his absence. For Lévi-Strauss myth is a way for a culture to work over social contradictions...

Read more about Ghosting: Dead to the World

On Being Left Out: On FOMO

Adam Phillips, 20 May 2021

Tragedies – which Freud uses to make sense of childhood experiences, never comedies – are about the tragic hero’s attempted self-cure for the ordeals of exclusion. Being left out begins as tragedy,...

Read more about On Being Left Out: On FOMO

G&Ts on the Veranda: The Science of Man

Francis Gooding, 4 March 2021

The idea that racism is scientifically bogus, or that gender is neither binary nor fixed, or that all ways of living have their historical roots: these things eventually became axioms in the humanities...

Read more about G&Ts on the Veranda: The Science of Man

On the Barone

John Foot, 4 March 2021

In September​ the Uruguayan footballer Luis Suárez turned up at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia to take an Italian test. This tough language exam, a requirement for anybody...

Read more about On the Barone

A Pie Every Night: Schizophrenia in the Family

Deborah Friedell, 18 February 2021

For researchers interested in schizophrenia, the Galvins seemed like a bonanza: figure out why six of the twelve children got sick, but not the other six, and maybe you could get somewhere. A pharmaceutical...

Read more about A Pie Every Night: Schizophrenia in the Family

In the late 1950s, the CIA’s schemes included using an aerosol to lace the air with LSD in the Havana studio where Fidel Castro made his radio broadcasts, sprinkl­ing Castro’s boots with thallium...

Read more about Lace the air with LSD: Brain Warfare

The Head in the Shed: Reading Bones

Gavin Francis, 21 January 2021

When the police bring Sue Black a bag of bones and ask what she makes of them she starts out with four questions: Are they human? Are they of forensic interest? Who was this person? Do they tell us anything...

Read more about The Head in the Shed: Reading Bones

At the British Museum: Tantra

James Butler, 21 January 2021

It began​ with the beheading of a god. In a dispute over theological primacy, Brahma – traditionally identified as the creator – insulted Shiva. The offended deity poured all his...

Read more about At the British Museum: Tantra

The Limits of Caste

Hazel V. Carby, 21 January 2021

Race, Isabel Wilkerson claims, is ‘a recent phenomenon in human history’, deriving from the Spanish word raza (in the context of the Atlantic slave trade), and ‘caste’ the much older term. She...

Read more about The Limits of Caste

Twenty Types of Human: Among the Neanderthals

John Lanchester, 17 December 2020

That feeling of similar-but-not-quite is present all through the history of our engagement with the Neanderthals: when we look at them we are looking at a distorted reflection in a mirror. As with a mirror-gazer,...

Read more about Twenty Types of Human: Among the Neanderthals

Mothers were different: The Breadwinner Norm

Susan Pedersen, 19 November 2020

Fathers sat down to a kipper or a boiled egg at breakfast (and gave one fav­oured child the top); their dependants ate porridge. Kind fathers sometimes shared tidbits; others avoided the whole drama and...

Read more about Mothers were different: The Breadwinner Norm

To Die One’s Own Death

Jacqueline Rose, 19 November 2020

Freud is offering a philosophy of grief. He helps us understand why what is happening among us now can feel as much an internal as an external catastrophe. Death in a pandemic is no way to die.

Read more about To Die One’s Own Death

Today, the singular ‘they’ is more popular than ever in colloquial English, and has prompted grammarians, some more grudgingly than others, to conclude that the missing word has been with us all along....

Read more about He, She, One, They, Ho, Hus, Hum, Ita: How Should I Refer to You?

Not in Spanish: Bilingualism

Michael Hofmann, 21 May 2020

The author is obviously in love with his subject, taking it everywhere with him, seeing it wherever he goes. ‘Most of the people I know are bilingual’ is his delightful shrug.

Read more about Not in Spanish: Bilingualism

Short Cuts: Internet Speak

Lauren Oyler, 7 May 2020

The internet’s contribution to language has been to give us more ways to communicate without saying anything at all :(

Read more about Short Cuts: Internet Speak