Deep Culture
Culture: the economic, demographic and technological conditions in a society, and the resulting ideologies and aesthetics that shape the lives and experiences of the people who live in it. We think of these forces as underlying– metaphorically beneath our everydays…
Strange vortices of power
This week’s Culture Morsel reflects on influence. Millie Bobby Brown, the talented 14 year old British actress, star of Netflix’s Stranger Things, has just been named on Time Magazine’s 2018 100 most influential people list…
Children of the fatherland
The FameWorks are in Sweden next week, so we’ve been keeping our eye out for anything interesting going on in that culture. It turns out they’ve just this month re-introduced conscription…
You mean what you eat
This week the Christian period of Lent begins, and we are reminded of the important mythical significance of foods.
Dis-cuss
Talk is Cheap – The myth of the Focus Group is one of the Guardian’s weekly Long Reads. This one, by US academic Liza Featherstone, is long on campus conspiracy theory and short on understanding…
The boys are back in town
It’s 10 years since the global financial crisis and high time we had another one. As and when we do, there’s sure to be renewed interest in the most dynamic emerging markets. And there seem few more dynamic than Bangladesh…
A highly effective cup of tea
I had the pleasure of a cup of tea with Paul Feldwick the other day…
No lakh of babies yet
There’s something of a preoccupation with large numbers in India. What other country has its own terms for hundreds of thousands (lakh) or tens of millions (crore) and its own way of writing them down in figures?
A guardian of the past and the future
It’s been a big couple of weeks for the Guardian – Britain’s newspaper of choice for the progressively minded (or irritatingly ‘right on’ depending on which way you look at it.)
The letter of the lore
It’s been brewing for a while but it’s now official. Kazakhstan (an endlessly beautiful country I had the pleasure of visiting for two weeks last summer) is switching from Cyrillic to Latin script…