Caught in the respectability trap
Speaking of letting people enjoy things, let’s talk about… respectability politics. The dark side of embracing the personal as political is definitely the moment we start policing ourselves to...
Category: Culture
The best television surprises of 2018
While coming back to favorite TV shows is always something to look forward to in any new year, there’s something special about discovering fresh series that you end up loving. Much like opening...
Can we stop recording ourselves doing good deeds, please?
It’s the time of year when a lot of people turn their thoughts to charity. Perhaps it’s the freezing weather that makes us grateful for a warm home and hyper aware of those who have nowhere to...
Creativity, Motivation, & Identity: A Conversation with the New-Gen Creatives Jessica Hazell and Alex Beighton
I'm sitting with Jessica Hazell, an Australian artist who encapsulates the beauty that is the human body via oil paint while working at a coffee shop in East London, as well as Alex Beighton, a...
Hulk Hogan’s triumphant return presages more rehabilitated stars
Hulk Hogan just returned to thunderous applause after three years in exile. In 2015, Hogan was erased from the company’s canon. Not only scrubbed from the website and banned from being talked...
For 2019, give up the ‘guilty pleasure’
Calling something a “guilty pleasure” is the “bless your heart” of media consumption, innit? It’s December, so that means it’s time for year end lists of wins and loses, and that little...
Spare me the Bush hagiography
President George H.W. Bush had a massive Washington sendoff yesterday, complete with heartfelt speeches and a dazzling array of hagiographic headlines; to read about the former president today, one...
A soured Independence Day celebration in increasingly nationalistic Poland
In Poland’s largest ever march of National Independence, more than 200,000 people took to the streets to commemorate 100 years since Poland gained independence after 123 years of partition by...
Why is it still so radical for women to cut their hair?
As I hear the electric shaver graze against the back of my head while sitting in a hairdresser in West London, I watch as the blonde pieces of what used to be part of me fall onto the floor. Shit....
#ThisIsNotConsent campaign displays underwear to protest archaic rape myths
We are told that things are different now. We are told that times have changed. That maybe back in the 1960s, the criminal justice system was unfair on victims of sexual violence but that, around the...