Black metal, can you stop being racist please

Black metal is the objectively the silliest subgenre of metal, but also the one that takes itself most seriously. For those of you who don’t share metallers’ obsessive love of splitting hairs over genre, black metal is broadly similar to death metal, but if death metal often feels very ‘dense’ and heavy, black metal is …

Some good episodes of The Simpsons (part 1)

‘The Simpsons’ is, pretty much indisputably, the best TV show ever. Given how consistently brilliant the show was throughout almost all its run*, many ‘average’ episodes of the show are still full of solid gold. To that end, here is part one of an occasional series on really, really good Simpsons episodes that don’t tend …

Guilt, shame and responsibility

Guilt and shame are often thought of as if they are the same, or as if they are synonyms for each other. But they are not. There are two different ways of distinguishing them that I have been introduced to by counsellors or therapists. One is that guilt is personal and internal, while shame is …

Books that are good: Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio

  My favourite thing about the Penguin Classics series is that they can introduce you to books that are genuine classics of world literature that you would otherwise never have heard of. Alongside their editions of Dickens, Dostoevsky and Flaubert are things like the stories of Japanese Modernist Ryunoske Akutagawa, the ancient Indian collection of fables …

Little Richard: the best. Literally

I don’t really like the way the way that, when someone famous dies, there’s a rush of articles saying “oh yeah, that person we haven’t thought about for years was actually really great!” I wouldn’t want to look like I’m contributing to this sort of thing. On the other hand, I bloody love Little Richard, …

Ancient Indian spaceships and black Egyptians: how not to destroy colonialism

I recently wrote about the ‘ancient astronaut’ hypothesis. This post is a sort of follow-up to that looking at how other types of pseudohistory also (maybe inadvertently) reinforce the very ideological points they claim to be arguing against – in this case, colonialism. (This post came out a lot longer than I'd thought, so consider …

Things can only get better: ancient astronauts and progress

One of the more popular ‘paranormal conspiracy theories’ – if we can call it that – is the ‘ancient astronauts’ idea. This is the suggestion that aliens visited Earth at some point in the past, and affected human society in some major way. The 'evidence' put forward most frequently for this is the idea that …

Lydia Davis and the deferral of happiness

I’m a huge fan of the US writer Lydia Davis, who to my mind is one of the most inventive, profound and funniest writers of the last thirty years or so. In addition to her five books of stories (the first four available in The Collected Stories) and her novel The End of the Story, …

Bursting the bubble

In these days of increasingly polarised politics, it can be very easy to be stuck in a little bubble of people who only agree with you. “How can people possibly have voted Leave/elected Trump/decided racism is OK again?” you wonder, not realising how out of tune you are with the rest of the world! The …

Where do you come from? Not Paris, anyway

Europe in 2017: where an actual, literal fascist wins around 35% of the vote in a presidential election, and this is a good thing. It’s hard to feel completely overjoyed about le Pen’s defeat. The fact the Front National can get as far as they did is worrying – they, and the people who were …