The Lie of Beauty: Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘A Little Life’

The artist David Wojnarowicz recalls, in a 1989 essay he wrote after his HIV diagnosis, a time he spent ‘standing in the mountains of a small city in New Mexico’, experiencing ‘a sudden and intense feeling of rage looking at those…

The Milk Fetish

In December 2014 Coca-Cola launched their latest product, Milka-Cola or ‘Fairlife’. Sandy Douglas, Coke’s global chief customer officer, speaking at a Morgan Stanley investment conference, announced Fairlife as ‘a milk that’s premiumised and tastes better and we’ll charge twice as much for it as the…

Floating Signifiers: Thoughts on the Figure

Last year I was walking along a beach towards a Martello tower, when I saw a figure perched on its rim. Was it standing guard or threatening to jump? Moving closer, I realised it would never have to decide. The sculpture on the tower is one of five…

Black Mountain College: Searching the Self

John Rice sits alone in a modest bedroom at Robert E Lee Hall, a three-story YMCA assembly building in the tiny North Carolinian community of Black Mountain. It is September 1933. Writing in his autobiography a decade later he ponders:

“What is a lasagne?”: Nostalgia, Pastiche and Working Class Experience

When Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey premiered in 1957, it was remarkable for its abrupt rejection of the misleading romantic notions about class, race and sexual orientation that were lodged in the…

‘Café Chocolate’: Teletubbies’ Sublime Horizons

I often tell people that Teletubbies gave me a sense of the sublime.

For those of you who by some miracle do not know, Teletubbies was a wildly popular psychedelic children’s TV show of 365 (!) episodes that left…

All the Lonely People: On Urban Invisibility

‘Somehow, you just vanish.’ These are the words of Kristin Scott Thomas, who said in an interview with The Telegraph that ‘when you’re walking down the street, people slam doors in your face — they just don’t notice you.’ At a certain age, she claimed…

The Drowning Child: Intuition and the Neural Philosophy Movement

Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun…

Metaphors We Die By

Around 470 BC a man was buried at Paestum, now in modern Italy, then still part of Greece. His coffin-like tomb, discovered in the late 1960s, had scenes painted on its inside: a symposium and, on the inside of the lid, a young man mid-dive, leaping from a height into the sea. Diving here is a…