April 2020

The health secretary, Matt Hancock, supported by Downing Street, has persistently denied that attaining herd immunity, by allowing the disease to infect most people, was ever a policy, goal, strategy or even “part of the plan”.

Last month, global downloads of the apps Zoom, Houseparty and Skype increased more than 100 percent as video conferencing and chats replaced the face-to-face encounters we are all so sorely missing.

Remember restaurants? I do, but dimly: candlelight, cloth napkins, a basket of warm bread. Food delivered in courses

Food is a window into any culture. In Soviet society, gender and food were always tightly interconnected, which looks like an ideal representation of the ambiguous nature of Communist ideology...

Melancholy is a condition unsuited to a pandemic. Like ennui, it is an ailment born of stability. The strong light of catastrophe withers it.

“In the 1430s, Margery Kempe wrote the first autobiography in English. She replaced existence with the desire to exist,” writes Robert Glück...

I was just wetting my toes into the sands of self-isolation in Delhi, when a putrid smell came along, an estrangement within another estrangement.

This is the third in a weekly baking series dedicated to Leonora Carrington. This recipe fell into my hands on a day I don’t remember...

The poet is born in squalor, his first love. Some of the poet’s favorite words include seedy, shabby, seamy.

Statue of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Hamburg, Germany. via Flickr/KeokiSeu (cc) by Stephen R. Haynes Why did 13 people make their way to my campus on a dreary February evening in 2020 for a new class I was teaching on a long-dead German theologian called Dietrich Bonhoeffer? We obviously shared...

Solitude has become a topic of fascination in modern Western societies because we believe it is a lost art – often craved, yet so seldom found...

Both X’ed Out and Vivarium assume an other world that leaks into the main frame world where most of the action happens...

If you want to garden and you’re able, do it now. If you want revolution and you’re able, do it now...

The collaboration between heartland arena rock bard Bruce Springsteen and punk poet goddess Patti Smith which led to “Because the Night”...

Borges wrote, “I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin...