This piece goes in search of a genius who went to Harvard aged 15, wrote comic songs that were a huge hit and with which he toured the world, then almost entirely vanished from the stage. Talking to People magazine in 1982, as ever he had the best words to describe some of what had changed “Things I once thought were funny are scary – now I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.”
If “Her Cocky Doctors” and “Her Cocky Firefighters” aren’t familiar to you, you probably haven’t come across the scandal in the self-published romance novel world known as “Cockygate”. This piece dives into the world of romance authors battling for supremacy on the Amazon e-book charts.
A piece proposing that many of the ideas of Enlightenment philosophy put forward by Locke, Hume and Kant had actually been conceived a century earlier in Ethiopia.
A study of the history of the dictionary and the evolving work of lexicographers in the internet age.
Amol Rajan, BBC Media Editor and former Editor of The Independent, delivered this lecture on the future of journalism, aptly summarised in the subhead as “How to Save Journalism (from Itself)”.
This piece looks at the Marvel superheroes over time, and asks whether the subversive streak that once ran strong in them has been lost.