With the Option to Sell Out
For forty years the center had been drifting steadily to starboard. So what if it jumped a ways to port? It might have been abrupt, but it’s not as though anyone was proposing the abolition of the monarchy or the nationalization
Read MoreThe Complicity of Health and Medical Personnel in Post-9/11 Torture
As the American psychologist and architect of the Bush-era torture programme, Dr James Mitchell, took the stand last week, I was reminded of Timothy Snyder’s Twenty Lessons on Tyranny.
Read MoreVictoria Brockmeier: Living With PTSD
You hear stories, growing up, of what you were like as a baby. You used to love to suck on lemon slices, you slept with your face buried in the cat’s fur, you spent every car ride trying to wiggle out of your car seat to look out the...
Read MoreTeresa K. Miller and Gregory Giles Discuss Memory
More than once, my maternal grandmother went to a Seattle fire station for aid, certain she was having a heart attack.
Read MoreGone Gentrified
In her introduction to London: Aspects of Change (1964), Ruth Glass wrote that the city was “too vast, too complex, too contrary and too moody” to be known entirely.
Read MoreEd Simon: Another Man’s System
Excavated from the Iraqi desert at Tel Asmar in 1933 by a group of archeologists from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute were a dozen votive figurines
Read MoreMeaningful Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence
In African Freedom, Phyllis Taoua offers a study of “meaningful freedom” in Africa since independence from the perspective of literary studies...
Read MoreNathaniel Kennon Perkins: Mexican Breakfast
It’d been almost ten years since I’d seen my friend Adam. I didn’t even know that he’d gotten married. We’d casually kept in touch through the Internet...
Read MoreAdversarial culture rests on dubious ideas…
Philosophical discussions, whether in a professional setting or at the bar, frequently consist of calling out mistakes in whatever has been proposed: ‘This is all very well, but …’
Read MoreAn Organic Marx?
The effort to revive and recover critical theory and its intellectual precedents has become more difficult at a time in which ‘critique’ is regularly denounced as negative, skeptical and anthropocentric
Read MoreBeer and Cider
There is no beverage which I have liked "to live with" more than beer; but I have never had a cellar large enough to accommodate much of it, or an establishment numerous enough...
Read MoreAss as Raw Heart
Over more than three decades and thirteen books of poems, Carl Phillips has been conducting an inquiry into intimacy, especially sexual intimacy...
Read More“How does one not write a depressing book about depression?”
Mary Cregan’s debut work of nonfiction, The Scar: A Personal History of Depression and Recovery, is likely shelved in the bookshop’s memoir section.
Read MoreWhat I’M Eating
Hi. I am a popular novelist, and these are my thoughts about global warming. I grew up in a major East Coast city or perhaps some lesser, sadder place that I’ve built a relatively successful
Read MoreNot Enough Voters for Corbyn
Before trying to examine the outcome of the 2019 general election, before any attempt to analyse the social complexities of the electorate that it reveals, it is important to understand three things.
Read MoreEd Simon on Sean Bonney
Prophets often die before their time, usually when the rest of us need their voices most. This was the fate of the English radical poet Sean Bonney, who died last November
Read MoreProtesting the Citizenship (Amendment) Act
The BJP has long believed that its anti-Muslim project has two enemies: Muslims, and those non-Muslims who see Muslims as equal citizens under the constitution.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreI 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,
Read MoreIt’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?”
Read MoreFrom the backseat, Jude saying, Mama, I HATE Republicans, and the way he says HATE, saying it the way only a seven-year-old can.
Read MoreThat 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.
Read MoreOn 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.
Read MoreIn the spring of 1793, the entomologist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Herbst, as a means to supplement his lectures at the newly founded Berliner Tierarzneischule
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![‘[House at the end of time]’, ‘[beneath a lake…]’ and ‘[Of every little thing never left me]’ by Joseph Spece](https://www.berfrois.com/uploads/2019/10/Studies_of_Water_passing_Obstacles_and_falling-110x90.jpg)






