We are used to cultural conservatives bemoaning the ‘hook up culture’. Usually it’s also older people criticising the young, for enjoying pleasures they can no longer experience. Steve Latham The accusations are familiar: more promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, using social media like Tinder and Grindr for casual sex, […]
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Life and death in the gulag
Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982) was first arrested in Moscow at an underground printshop in 1929 and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. In 1937 he was arrested again for counterrevolutionary activities and sent to the Kolyma region in the Russian Far East. Sean Sheehan He spent the next fifteen years […]
Mapping mental states
Surrealism lurks in the city – resting, hiding, waiting to be noticed, observed, called forth into recognition. Steve Latham These are times of the signs, random suggestions, inviting us to enter the serendipity of found significances, a conceptual equivalent of ‘found art’. To locate the oddness, even amidst […]
Should we love ourselves?
Do people really love themselves? Some writers think that people do not love themselves, saying that true self-love, in the sense of self-acceptance, is learned, often very painfully so. I agree. Nigel Pocock Part of the difficulty is that people confuse self-esteem and self-love. I concur, with Scott […]
Has a culture of ‘rights’ prevented healing from abuse?
This looks like a highly provocative and paradoxical title, and so it is. What we present here is an outworking of Ofer Zur’s article (2006), The Pathology of Victimhood. Nigel Pocock Zur argues that the tendency to ignore the psychology of victims arises from a fear of blaming […]
















