Culture
After the Monoculture
The death of shared culture was supposed to be progress. The evidence is more complicated. What is lost when the...
Rabat’s Book Year Is Really About Who Gets Remembered
Rabat becoming UNESCO World Book Capital is not just a literary honour. It is a test of whether books can...
Authorship Under Volume
The cost of producing a plausible book has fallen near to zero. The question is what that does to a...
The album, as object — what becomes of a sixty-year form
The album has been the organising unit of popular music for six decades. Under streaming, its everyday function has been...
What a library is for, when half a million books stop being lent
The 2024 ruling in Hachette v. Internet Archive — and the half-million titles removed from digital lending in its wake...
The Archive and the Memory
Every civilisation has confused preservation with transmission. AI training on the cultural corpus introduces a new version of this very...
What a government owes a festival — and what it does not
The Home Office withdrew Ye’s travel authorisation and an entire festival collapsed behind it. The ban was defensible. The wreckage...
What the Farm Transmits
America lost approximately fifteen thousand farms in 2025. The loss of each farm is also the loss of what that...
Loneliness Is Not a Wellness Problem
The health consequences of social isolation have been quantified with precision. The policy response has treated it as a personal...
The Library That Doesn’t Know It’s Burning
Across two decades of digitisation, institutions have converted their archives without asking what they were losing. The photograph survives. The...
The attention economy’s biological cost. This is what distraction is actually doing.
The conversation about smartphones and social media has been conducted almost entirely in the language of psychology and productivity. The...
We didn’t develop a loneliness problem. We demolished the places where loneliness couldn’t survive.
The loneliness epidemic is framed as a psychological condition requiring psychological intervention. The evidence suggests it is the predictable consequence...
The Louvre has nine million visitors a year. That is the problem.
A high-profile theft, a parliamentary inquiry, and a decade-long fraud scheme revealed an institution in distress. The coverage treated it...
In Praise of Wasted Time
Boredom is not a problem to be solved. It is a cognitive state we are systematically destroying — and we...
