critiquing ideology
Today I had an encounter with Boris. I was sitting in the library attempting to work when Boris charged in – made a load of noise – and left again. He was in the worst of moods. As I would be if I’d left the wide open world to sit in a dusty European studies […]
Read More…In our age of nearly constant communication – whether it be through the mass media, advertising, or perpetual group chats and text messages – has language lost its content? Is language in our modern era, as Martin Esslin explains in the The Theatre of the Absurd, “devoid of real meaning?” It seems that as methods of communication […]
Read More…When the wall came down in 1989, people began peering into their Stasi files. Some realized that those they had loved were spying on them, that intimate details of their life were tracked, recorded, and organized without their knowledge. Some opted not too look, for fear of being hurt, betrayed by intimate members of their […]
Read More…Tomorrow I will post something spectacular, it’s going to be a lovely day. Update from ‘tomorrow’: As Bill Withers predicted, the weather today is certainly lovely. Yet, as I sit inside Senate House Library, reading sections of Vaclav Havel’s Letters to Olga, a series of letters that he wrote to his wife from prison between 1979-1983, […]
Read More…The two most famous strands of international relations theory – realism and liberalism – dictate that the international system is characterised by ‘anarchy’. In 1951 John Herz published a book entitled Political Realism and Political Idealism in which he coined the famous term ‘The Security Dilemma’. “A structural notion in which the self-help attempts of states […]
Read More…“We must never forget the joy of doing something slow and something difficult, the satisfaction of not doing what is easiest. The constellation of inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and a life of total, efficient conformity” – The New York Times It seems now more than ever that the right choice […]
Read More…I’ve always thought the phrase ‘time is money’ is a bit of a stupid one to be honest. Why would time be money? The common understanding seems to be that in the time that you have, you can make money, so don’t be wasting that time doing something else because you could be making money […]
Read More…Howard Zinn (1922 – 2010), the influential historian and social activist, has several simple quotes that are particularly adept at explaining the role that the average citizen has played in both horrific and progressive moments in human history. The former: “Historically, the most terrible things – war, genocide, and slavery – have resulted not from […]
Read More…When Alexander Graham Bell first invented the telephone he proposed answering it with Ahoy-hoy. What an absolutely lovely thought. My personal preference is the more colloquial ‘a ding-dong’, which I find quite neatly breaks down the initial anxiety of telecommunication.
Read More…There is a quote by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright on the inspiring qualities of nature for the creative process: “Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature everyday for inspiration in the day’s work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain” While the structures of our […]
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The Junction 