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American TV and post-9/11 political imaginaries: 24, The West Wing and The Wire
Everyone my age will remember where they were on 9/11. I distinctly remember the BBC stopping a lunchtime episode of Neighbours for it, so I immediately knew something big was happening. As the day turned into a week, which turned into a month, which turned into a new epoch of…
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Witches, lesbians and Blackness: Queering Wicked
I’m not a big fan of musicals, but my kids really wanted to watch the new film Wicked so off we went to see the Wizard. Upon leaving the cinema though I admit to not just being taken in by the emotive, searing musical numbers, and the glittering and quite…
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The Comedian’s Irony: A Banana, gaffer tape, and the Cryptocurrency scam
In the annals of art history, Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian – a banana duct-taped to a wall – has always been an utter joke had tongue-in-cheek appeal. Its conceptual premise is simple yet vacuous: playfully critiquing the notion of art as an object of value. So, on 21st Nov, in the…
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Architecture and Power: Trump 2.0 and what it means for the city
Anyone who has sat through one of my lectures on cities will be sick of hearing that the built environment is never a politically neutral plane. Architecture and urban planning have always served as tools for political ideologies, shaping not only skylines but also the societies that inhabit them; and…
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The Substance: The Emptiness of the Neoliberal Self
***This is a guest post by Fern Snedeker (they/them). Feedback, thoughts, and criticism are happily welcome at natesneds at gmail.com, and their other writing can be found at nathanielsnedeker.com*** In a world of self-commodification, never-ending branding in life (and death), and endless self-improvement, The Substance offers an macabre antidote: reunification…
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Woody, a fascist: A contemporary reading of Toy Story
Toy Story is a fantastic film, let me say that straight away. Indeed, the first 3 films are considered one of the finest trilogies in all cinematic history and there is no doubting that they have had a profound effect on many people all over the world. And yes, Woody…
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On Being Evil
Today of all days feels like a good time to revisit how we theorise ‘evil’. Too often we will hear people say “he’s evil” or “they’re pure evil” or “that country is evil”, but this just is invoking very blinkered, binary and too moralistic forms of what evil is, often…
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90s Lads’ Mags and the toxic masculinity we can’t escape
Like any teenage boy with his hormones raging, I admit to there being the odd poster of Jennifer Aniston on my bedroom wall alongside Pearl Jam, Faith No More and Duncan Ferguson. I was a child of the 90s, so of course I was exposed to the ‘lads mag’ culture…
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Fredric Jameson (1934 – 2024)
Over the weekend, while many of us were undoubtedly enjoying the fruits of the cultural conditions of late capitalism (be that at a theme park, out with friends not seen for years, or simply sat in front of the TV or social media), the main architect of our nuanced understanding…
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Hope, fractured
In the scattered debris of our contemporaneous existence in this most heinous chthulucene, we are too often fractured asunder. The planet, spinning like a forgotten top on the edge of ruin, its centrifugal force pushes us to despair. From the quasar-flecked heavens to the quarks evading detection in our nuclei,…
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