The Inkling Magazine

On Boredom, and Paying Attention to Karl Ove Knausgaard

I read an international bestseller this summer: the second volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Or, at least, so the front cover told me. It turns out that ‘international bestseller’ in the case of Knausgaard means something…

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…

Facebook’s Plan to Destroy Space

The history of communications technology is the history of the world slowly shrinking. Writing allows us to share thoughts with people over great distances; trains let us send letters more quickly; fibre optic cables let us do so in real time. The more the world shrinks…

Country Shade and Lemonade: The Beach Boys and the Fête Galante

Country shade and lemonade
Guess I’m slowing down 
It’s a turned back world 
With a local girl 
In a smaller town.

Materialising Ghosts: Leckey’s Archival Dreamwork

‘FIORUCCI MADE ME HARDCORE.’ (1999)

“An experienced event is finite — at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before and…

Walking in the City, with Headphones

I am addicted to walking with my headphones in my ears. It’s something I try to give up from time to time, purposefully leaving the headphones at home before going outdoors to prove to myself that a day without them isn’t that bad, that the sounds of the world…

The Stuff of a Town

‘[This stone] is for me a wolf, noble and courageous, with hollowed flanks, nicked with wounds and blows. And it always will be, even tidied into horizontal layers or domesticated into vaults. As I bring proportion and harmony to the abbey, it alone will keep its independent spirit; even…