The US psychologist Michelle Gelfand wrote in The Guardian (2.2.21) about different cultural responses to the pandemic.   Steve Latham   She suggests that “tight” societies, with high levels of adherence to rules, reacted better to Covid than loose” societies, which demonstrated weaker rule-keeping. This is part of her wider […]

To paraphrase Marx, Covid “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. We are living the diminishment of the world. It is getting smaller.   Steve Latham   We are not travelling as much: internationally, but also within countries, under lockdowns, and even between city neighbourhoods. With official […]

I have a sore throat. I want to cough, but coughing could mean I have the virus. So, superstitiously, I stop myself. I figure that, if I really had it, then I wouldn’t be able to hold back.   Steve Latham This is the crazy condition we’re in. Thinkers used […]

“Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”   Steve Latham   James Boswell, in his famous biography of […]