Category: Culture
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Saltburn’s strange parallel with the refugee crisis
Saltburn is a modern film, of its time in its portrayal of homo-eroticism and a quirky, ‘A24 horror’ vibe. Here’s why I think Saltburn, deliberately or not – may also be finding relevance by resonating with people’s fear of refugees and immigration: The first thing to understand is that Saltburn is not an ‘eat the…
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Why we give up on Dutch
The point of learning any language, Dutch included; is to be able to communicate more clearly with the people around you. Unlike with other languages, trying to learn Dutch is guaranteed to slam the brakes on quality of communication. This half Dutch half American Derek Scott Mitchell has become a total hero by memifying this…
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Yes it’s a glorified autocomplete, but so are you
Did you know that you can only perceive an object’s colour if you’re looking directly at it, that the human eye does not have ‘rods’ capable of distinguishing colours in peripheral vision. It sounds crazy but it can be demonstrated easily – if someone holds a randomly coloured tennis ball in your peripheral vision you…
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5 thoughts after 6 nights in America
I love the USA, its a Disney masterpiece, it’s a cheesy pop key change. American culture assumes the best in you and rubs off on you. It is however, boring talking about stuff you like, its much more interesting to pick through the confusing, unsatisfying aspects of experience – here are 5 things that stick…
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Maybe I don’t want to recycle
What do these two things have in common? In both cases it is implied that an unpleasant task falls on the shoulders of the individual in order to allow space for corporations to maximally thrive. Effectively asking people to take responsibility where its not in their interest to. ‘Privatise the profits, nationalise the debt’ In…
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Why being funny is the highest British value
Last summer I spent 2 weeks in the UK, after probably my longest time ever out of it. This time I brought Hao – despite living in Europe for 4 years it was his first time in Britain so I got to also view the country through the alien perspective: “The cars are more colourful…
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Toxic Englishness
When I saw this 10 second clip of Michael Gove clearly high on something strong, standing in the Commons ‘at work’, something made me angry, something clicked. It’s not that ‘they despise us’ or ‘they’re laughing at us’, although given their classist conditioning both these things will be true. It’s that the Tory front bench…