Posts tagged: culture

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  Look within: literary diaries and the culture of narcissism

  Our appetite for literary diaries has never been greater, with TikTok and Twitter feeds filled with snippets of writing from Virginia and extracts from Sylvia Plath’s food diary. But what can the contemporary desire for the diaries of others tell us about our individualistic society?
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  English Cricket is racist, sexist and elitist – to change it must learn from the grassroots game

  As the recently published Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket report confirmed, cricket in Britain is a deeply elitist, racist and sexist sport, dominated by a white, male establishment linked by the old school tie. Here, Sam Berkson powerfully analyses the history of the sport and says that the only way to save it is to learn from the sports' grassroots.
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  Behind Alice Neel’s Marxist Girl

  Irene Peslikis is often remembered simply as the subject of Alice Neel's portrait 'Marxist Girl', but as Chris Hayes writes she was also an inspiring artist and activist who played a pivotal role in feminist organising in New York.
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  "Inside the inferno": T. J. Clark on Pasolini

  Daniel Ward interviews art historian T. J. Clark about Pier Paolo Pasolini, neorealism, the influence of the Communist Party on post-war Italian culture and the recently published collection of Pasolini writing on painting, Heretical Aesthetics.
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  Remembering Martin Amis

  Martin Amis, who died aged 73 earlier this year, has long been criticised from the left but for his political positions––first with Stalinism in Koba the Dread and then Islamic terrorism and his mishandled remarks about the Muslim community. But, argues critic Jared Marcel Pollen, it is for his style that he should be remembered more than his punditry.
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  How It Should Be Between People

  The novels of Vigdis Hjorth, one of Norway’s most celebrated writers, offer a powerful meditation on what it means to relate to other people.
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  The Right-Wing Avant-Garde in American Fiction

  In recent years, the New York literary avant-garde has shifted from a Sanders-aligned socialism to a far more amorphous politics, taking in online reactionaries like Bronze Age Pervert and Curtis Yarvin. But how did this happen, and what can this tell us about the idea of the avant-garde today?
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  Make it New

  Recent years have seen a growing number of convincing pop songs produced entirely by machines. But what does this development tells us about contemporary culture's increasing homogeneity, and can artists use the technology against itself to create something genuinely new?
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  Stalinism in a British Accent

  HBO's new miniseries Chernobyl, a gloomy and lyrical historical drama that tells the story of the catastrophic explosion of a nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine in 1986, has taken the unusual decision to cast a nearly all British cast of actors. Why does Stalinism seem so plausible in a British accent, and what does that say about the parallels between contemporary Britain and the USSR?