Mahatma Gandhi is one of those people whose position as a hero of history is assured. He overcame the most powerful empire on earth with the power of nonviolence. He is immortalised through his quotable epigrams like “Be the change that you want to see in the world” and “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they… Read More
I’m writing this in the middle of a two-week quarantine in the UK. Don’t worry, I don’t have any Covid-19 symptoms—it’s just a precaution for people arriving from certain “high-risk” countries. Why the UK (with 46,000 deaths) is quarantining people from Serbia (with 500 deaths) could be the subject of another post about the intersection of Covid rules and international… Read More
In Children of the Cave, Finnish writer Virve Sammalkorpi imagines an encounter between a group of explorers and some strange creatures living in a cave in the remote forests of northern Russia that look like animals but also have some very human characteristics.
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Something is very wrong with the English language. People have started asking me if I have the “bandwidth” to work on new projects. What am I, a modem? This is part of a broader trend of viewing human beings as machines. When we need a break, we go offline. When we achieve something new, we level up. In a corporate… Read More
The UK Society of Authors recently published a new factsheet on writing about suicide and self-harm, and I wanted to highlight it and draw attention to its main lessons. Stories are powerful, and writers consequently bear a heavy responsibility for getting it right and not doing harm, especially when it comes to writing about topics like suicide and self-harm. About… Read More
This is a guest post by Lynsey Burrows at the Immigration Advice Service, an organisation of immigration lawyers based in the UK & Ireland. I don’t normally publish guest posts here, but this one is important and timely, and I think you’ll enjoy reading it. In 2012, Theresa May’s government created the ‘hostile environment’; a set of immigration policies and… Read More
The COVID-19 lockdown here in Belgrade was very strict in March and April, but this month it ended, and things are more or less back to normal now. The cafes, shops and restaurants are all open again, and there’s rarely a mask to be seen. Everyone seems to have decided the pandemic is over, and so far the numbers are… Read More
Climate change has become such a clear, species-threatening emergency that sometimes it feels strange to talk or write about anything else. Yes, I know, Covid-19. But a pandemic, although immensely destructive, will end eventually. In the longer term, climate change is a much bigger threat to our survival on this planet. Most of the things I spend my day thinking… Read More
In a short time, I’ve gone from travelling full-time to being under strict lockdown in a Belgrade apartment. Perhaps that’s why I’ve spent the month travelling through the world of books, from the Russian wilderness to a still-divided Germany and from the Balkans to the UK’s “hostile environment”—with a couple of side trips to Jamaica thrown in.
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