M. Munro: The Unconscious

She lay every morning under an avalanche of details, blissed: pictures of breakfasts in Patagonia, a girl applying foundation with a hardboiled egg, a shiba inu in Japan leaping from paw to paw to greet its owner

The Lost History of Prosecuting War Crimes by Amy Carney

Human Rights after Hitler describes the rise and fall of the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC). But author Dan Plesch did not write this book...

There can be comparatively little question that the place ordinarily occupied by dreams in literature is peculiarly unreal and unsatisfying. When the hero tells us that "last night he dreamed a dream"...

Do children really fall in love? Amanda Rose, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri who focuses on friendships and peer relationships in childhood and adolescence...

Julian of Norwich and the Process of Transformation

Julian of Norwich was born in 1342. No stranger to violence and suffering, she grew up in a world ravaged by the Hundred Years’ War between England and France and torn apart...

Thirty-Seven Pages by Shane Jesse Christmass

A while ago, someone on Facebook was selling books. I purchased a few titles by Alfred Jarry and Edouard Leve. This was years ago.

It is rare in the history of architecture for a new type of building to emerge. The Romans’ discovery of concrete birthed the great domes and fortifications of its empire.

From the moment that a light gets turned on in the morning, every action of a Western life uses energy. Its easy availability—thanks largely to the so-called fossil fuels—gave us modernity...

Herman Bennett’s African Kings and Black Slaves is a teaser, an invitation to think through the historiography on Atlantic slavery as a liberal metanarrative...

Elizabeth Holmes was said to be the ‘youngest self-made female billionaire’ of all time. And why not? Her invention was going to be the reason people – Americans first, but eventually everyone in the world – would lead better, healthier, longer lives.

A Disanalogy of Disanalogies by Roland Bolz

The following is ascribed to the 20th Century Polish mathematician Stefan Banach. "A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems...

How does a deeply read, supremely pyrotechnic wordsmith, pioneer of cyberculture who popularized culture jamming and first articulated the notion of Afrofuturism...

How the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed with the Wombat

Wombats captured the attention of English naturalists as soon as they found out about them from early settlers, explorers, and naturalists at the time of first contact...

If you’re a black British woman with working-class origins, the “class pay gap” for those working in top jobs is an astonishing £20,000.

Everyone knows the first 3 waves of feminism: the first was the political fight for women’s suffrage , the second was the revival of the struggle around...

A National Education Service: Berfrois Interviews Melissa Benn

Our education system divided our nation, broadly along the lines of social class, choosing winners and losers at an early age...

Women's sexual pleasure has rarely been treated as an appropriate subject for economics. Various political theorists have long ruminated on the dubiousness of even naming women’s sexual pleasure as though it were transhistoric...

Things essential to life are only getting more expensive…

People keep complaining about “income inequality” and writing books about how grindingly difficult it is for an alarmingly large number of Americans to get by...

Animal Spirits at the Nueva Burdalesa Bakery by Jessica Sequeira

A few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world. I lived in the tiny room of a pension on B----- street. Funds were running low.

I was eighteen years old when I was introduced to the fascinating world of Alasdair Gray. I read Poor Things (1992) in the second year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow,

It’s easiest to start from the impulse to problematize the position of the flâneur. The ugly word privilege hovers around it, and we turn to questions that we know the answer to, “Who, exactly, is allowed to wander, like so?”

‘Poem of Philosophical and Parental Conundrums Written In An Election Year’

From the backseat, Jude saying, Mama, I HATE Republicans, and the way he says HATE, saying it the way only a seven-year-old can.

That Diana and the Amazons speak ‘hundreds’ of languages is believable, given their situation and seeming enlightenment; that English becomes their go-to choice for daily chats off the Greek coast, less so.

On the ancient river, seagull rock crests out of the waters. An outcrop within its sight is thorned by a few young silhouettes, taking turns plunging into the river some feet below. Riverboats and water taxis, white river cruise-ships weave short and cyclical tours between the two shores.

Colin Raff: Variations on a Brandenburg Salamander

In the spring of 1793, the entomologist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Herbst, as a means to supplement his lectures at the newly founded Berliner Tierarzneischule