‘Culture’ serves here as a bit of a cheat term for all the other arts. Below, you’ll find collected essays on films, books, TV, theatre, a couple art installations, and some other miscellaneous little bits. See how you get on.
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The First Season of From is Actually Pretty Okay
From is a five-season supernatural horror series that’s sort of like the streaming response to Lost. First released in 2022, and ongoing to the present day, From is about a bunch of people trapped in a mysterious town where monsters…
The Odyssey Is… Fine?
I’ve been thinking lately about the difference between reviews and criticism. I’ve always said that I don’t write reviews – and sometimes I’m not able to quantify that. I’d maybe say that a review is about recommending (or not recommending)…
Style and Tedium in ‘Why I Write’
The Windham-Campbell Prizes are a series of literary awards conferred annually by Yale University. The awards are accompanied by a week-long festival with talks and interviews, film screenings, and a keynote lecture from an eminent writer. Collectively, the keynotes are…
On Time in Dune
I had a run last year watching Denis Villeneuve films – I watched Sicario, which I’d not seen before, and then Arrival, Blade Runner, and the two Dune movies. It’s not his whole catalogue, but it’s enough that certain concerns…
Anti-Biography in The Shepherd’s Life
James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life is written in opposition to a number of things. It’s written against the modern workforce, the nature of cubicle computer labour in urban environments. It’s written against our disconnect from our food, from the land,…
Knowledge in The Lord of the Rings
In the worst of all this recent sickness, I didn’t know if I would be writing again. I wasn’t sure how I’d come out of it – I’m still not sure, really. Things might be a little irregular here. I’ve…
Why We Make Art: On ‘The Long Run’
I’m trying to read more art criticism. I write here about video game narrative, and I come at it from a very bookish, literary background, and I’m starting to feel that I’m limited in how I can talk about games…
James Hamilton’s Constable Biography is Awful
I had maybe a dozen New Year’s Resolutions in 2025, and I moved away from just about all of them, so I haven’t set any for 2026, but if I did set one, it would be throwing out books that…
Photojournalism’s Probably Not For Reddit
In maths in high school, we would sometimes get an answer back marked RAWW – right answer, wrong working. It happened when you applied the wrong formula but ended up with the correct answer. There’s a cognate thing that happens…
Helplessness in Kafka
At university one of the books I studied was Don DeLillo’s White Noise, a horrid, hollow little book about the emptiness at the heart of American culture. White Noise follows Jack Gladney, a university professor who works in Hitler Studies…
Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation is Ass
Ways of Seeing is a 1972 art documentary by the maverick art theorist John Berger. A four-part series broadcasted by the BBC, Berger’s Ways of Seeing was one of the earliest articulations of the concept of the male gaze, and…
On Piss in Paradise Rot
Having talked about medical dramas, autism, and the hellscape depths of capitalism, we turn now to a simpler question: is there a piss kink in Paradise Rot? Paradise Rot is a 2009 short novel by Norweigan musician and novelist Jenny…
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