Hard power deploys brute force or makes manifest its capacity and willingness to do so. The soft power of storytelling does not command and coerce in this way but exerts its own form of dominance through its ability to script a particular perspective.   Sean Sheehan   Through the control […]

Israel’s genocide is being enacted on more than one front. The most brutal and horrendous way is by means of physical slaughter, evoking the Nazi genocide, and this is accompanied, in both Gaza and the Occupied Territories, by creating a new geography designed to replace Palestine and eradicate its cultural […]

It seems we are living in a post-truth age.  Politicians and the mainstream media fluently inhabit such a world. We are bereaved of truth, sculpted from social and political discourses, subject to the prison house that is language, and reality becomes an adjustable construct.   Sean Sheehan   The diverse […]

An intriguing and eye-catching subtitle – “When Amerindians Spoke Latin in sixteenth-century Mexico” – captures the appeal of a book that for its author, Serge Gruzinski, turns the alphabetic writing of the Spanish and Portuguese languages into the ‘real conquistadors that stormed the New World’.   Sean Sheehan   The […]

It is easy to find recipes online but having a laptop on the kitchen worktop while preparing foods and liquids is not a good idea and, besides, a physical cookbook provides focus and a stimulus that scrolling down a page on a screen often fails to deliver.   Sean Sheehan […]