One could chew over the Western canon heavies, the Brazilian cultural critic Oswald de Andrade believed, and still spew out something singularly Brazilian — a sensible enough proposition, you might think at first blush. After all, creativity is a parasitic …
The squashed birds of progress
Early in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, a magician performs a trick with a small bird which disappears in a cage flattened on the table. A small boy in the audience starts to cry, distraught that the bird was killed. The …
Make Britain Victorian again
In 1946, lorries and diggers rumbled into the grounds of Wentworth Woodhouse, then one of England’s grandest mansions. Its manicured lawns, gardens, and parkland stood on a coal seam that neared the surface, and the Labour Party’s Minister for Fuel …
Free speech is still worth fighting for
Freedom of expression is probably the most widely acknowledged human right in the world. Lip service is paid to it even in totalitarian states. Freedom of expression is not worth much in Russia or North Korea, but their constitutions guarantee …
Can the pro-Palestine Left redeem itself?
One of the greatest challenges human beings face is how to tease apart a bad act from a good character — or, conversely, a toxic personality from the good and worthy things he created. How do we separate the long-time …
Race is a status game
Growing up the son of a Nigerian father and Polish mother in Lagos, I often wondered what the real root of racial inequality was. Watching movies about the US civil rights movement with my father it was clear to me …
The West needs to grow up
The first modern revolution was neither French nor American, but English. Long before Louis XVI went to the Guillotine, or Washington crossed the Delaware, the country which later became renowned for stiff upper lips and proper tea went to war …
