A Man Divided: F Scott Fitzgerald and the Birth of Gatsby
“Through the narrator Nick, Fitzgerald describes the nightmarish, soul destroying, drunken despair of the mortgaged millions trapped in the conformist suburban sprawl financing their personal versions of the dream on hire purchase.”
The Public Information Films That Scared Seventies Children for Life
“Public information films – or PIFs to the aficionado – still exist today. We have seen them recently with regards to Covid; government advice on washing our hands, wearing masks and being careful of hugging our friends.
But next to the PIFs of the heyday of the genre, these touchy-feely, nicey-nicey televised messages are like comparing the Teletubbies with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
‘I Took Part in the Psilocybin Trial and It Changed My Life’
“I had seen an alternative reality, another way of being, and knew beyond anything I’d known before that day that life is extraordinary. And in that moment I felt happier, more alive, and more Me than I imagined was possible.”
‘What Do They Do For Us?’: Why I Love Wasps and You Should Too
“But, given the importance of natural pollinators to our food security and the apparent declines of well-recognised pollinators like bees and hover flies, now would be a good time to start taking wasp pollination a bit more seriously.”
Why Did We Go Bald? The Love and Loss of Human Hair
“Hairlessness, to put it baldly, was sexy. And a relatively hairless partner would be more likely to produce a less hairy younger generation. Soon the hair was dropping off us at a rate of knots.”
Remote Working: What the UK’s Last Lighthouse Keepers Can Teach Us About Isolation
“As the former keeper of one of the UK’s most remote lighthouses, his work has been a unique training ground for lockdown. Only with more elemental havoc.”
The Birdman of the Tower of London and the Missing Ravens
“It’s a very small world, he says, raven-keeping, “and being quirky is part and parcel of it, because it’s so full on”.”
‘Talk About First World Problems’: What Would the Pandemic Have Been Like in 2005?
How would he have handled a pandemic? It’s hard to imagine him getting involved in the sort of denialism, laced with conspiracy theory and a dash of anti-Chinese racism, that the Trump administration has fostered.”
Michele Kirsch: My Life As a Cleaner in London
Michele Kirsch on working as a cleaner in London, England, and the fascinating, unspoken social rules that keep a cleaner-cleanee relationship “shipshape and Bristol-fashion.”
How Noma Took Tokyo
The Copenhagen-based restaurant Noma is regularly rated as the world’s best; Tokyo is the gourmet capital of the world, with more Michelin stars than any other city. For five overwhelming and intense weeks, Noma came to Tokyo, with a waiting list of 60,000 diners. But could a restaurant renowned for its “local” focus succeed in a foreign city?
