Flash fiction is a writer’s genre. Often shorter than a tweet, the whole genre is built on competitions and exercises for creative writers rather than keeping a reader in mind – when we consider where flash fiction comes from and what it gives us, is it time we stop engaging with this ridiculous form?
The Art Museum of the Future
It can be stifling, going to a gallery. Imagine if we could touch the artworks. If blind people could engage with the brushstrokes and the shape of the oils on a canvas. If children could play, and stare, and laugh. If the Old Masters were in a room with the Blue Riders, if we didn’t have to guard the paintings from natural light and thieves and damage.
Here’s One for the Vintage Lovers
Do you ever think about how a certain percentage of the things you own will find their end with you?
The Multiverse, string theory, and how we make choices.
Alternate universes are not governed in the typical way we laypeople describe them - 'somewhere in an alternate universe', and don’t really function the way they do in art, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t take a closer look and use complicated mathematics to influence the way we live our lives.
The Biographical Imperative: Reading Paul Simon like we’d read Taylor Swift
The way we read Swift is gendered and somewhat modern: her 'eras' align with the aesthetics she presents, and stan culture has dissected every relationship she's ever had until we're all sure who or what inspired every song. What if we read other Grammy royals this way?
The Who?Siers: what it means to follow a band beyond success.
In the halcyon days of 2014 I went to a small gig by a band used to even smaller gigs. On the recording of that gig you can hear the incredulity in their voices multiple times over the course of the evening as the crowd go wild, singing and dancing with abandon. This is a... Continue Reading →
Side Hustle or Passion Project?
I think most of us have a creative project in our bottom drawer or a business idea that we’re working on alongside our conventional job if you’re an idiot like me, you may even have both, things you couldn’t choose between and keep you very busy, but which can be tabled at a time when your ‘real’ work has to be your main focus.
What Does Europe Mean to Me?
Expanded from a National Geographic competition entry.
What Do I Want
There is a difference between ambitions, these things that we strive for and work to make happen, and wanting something to be our own or to be different. We know the difference between need vs want, but do we need to learn the difference between want and desire?
What is a good education?
1) Contact time isn’t what defines your degree as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. 2) Neither is the subject you study. 3) Neither is the institution in which you study. 4) Student loans are not sufficient for either the institution or the individual. 5) Education should only be for those who ‘deserve’ it (replace deserve with whichever word you like, they’re all there in the comments). 6) This is a crisis that is not only affecting the young and the middle-classes. 7) European degrees, or having the army pay for your degree, are not solutions. 8) We cannot institute the policy of ‘paying’ people for attainment in their degree by giving people with 1st class degrees a discount.
Late Romantic 