Birdsong
A fine short story, set in Lagos, about an affair going sour.
The Bard
The powerful story of a man who made it his mission to preserve the songs sung to him by fellow prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp.
How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump
A look at how wealthy areas of the United States that were historically bastions of establishment Republican politics have come to align with Donald Trump.
My Life With Face Blindness
On life with prosopagnosia, a condition that impairs sufferers’ abilities to recognise familiar faces.
‘Feasting on fantasy’: my month of extreme immersion in Disney+
The author’s time spent bingeing on Disney+ provides the perfect backdrop for this study of the company’s canon, their ‘mission’, and their corporate fortunes.
Color and Light
It’s a safe bet that anyone who enjoyed reading Sally Rooney’s novels, or is enjoying watching the BBC adaptation of Normal People, will enjoy this short story.
Mapping subterranean Britain’s tubes
A speaker from the Ordnance Survey details the challenges that mapping today’s subterranean infrastructure presents in this talk.
What Happened to Val Kilmer? He’s Just Starting to Figure It Out.
Yes, this is a profile of Val Kilmer, but it’s also something more far reaching, reflecting on the world in lockdown, religious belief and serious illness, Mark Twain, and the perverse impact that fame can have (“God wants us to walk, but the devil sends a limo.”).
Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing
The author of this piece looking to help readers finding the pandemic hard to comprehend outlined its scope as “everything from the virus itself to the symptoms it causes, from deceptive numbers to swirling misinformation, from our desire for simple narratives to the nature of expertise in a crisis too large for any one person to grasp.”
Hey, Hey, LBJ…
An archive profile of Lyndon B. Johnson, US President between 1963 and 1969, a period that included both the passing of the Civil Rights Act, and much of The Vietnam War. The piece reflects on a change in the relationship between Americans and their President in times of crisis that was seen in Johnson’s time in office. He writes of Johnson’s predecessor – “to the day of his death Kennedy could have commanded the virtually unanimous support—even fealty—of the nation in a foreign crisis, a summit setback, a missile confrontation. In the jargon of the time, “bipartisanship” would have seen to it that the people “rallied around the President” while “politics stopped at the water’s edge.” In crisis, people would have trusted—even expected—him not only to do the right thing, but to know the right thing.”