The official narrative  behind data-driven surveillance technology promises a new era of “impartial”, “scientific”, “evidence-based” policing, sewn together by the techno-futurist allure of automated algorithms and their supposed apolitical neutrality. The reality of the vast upsurge in UK surveillance since 2020  is one of alarming privacy invasion and intense racialisation, especially against racial and ethnic minorities. Tools like the now-defunct Metropolitan Police's Gan

How many Ukrainian soldiers have died in the last three years of war? You probably haven’t heard because, newsworthy as the figure should be, western media outlets rarely report it. The latest authoritative calculation  suggests that both sides have lost roughly the same number of men: that is, approximately 200,000 to 220,000 dead. Staggeringly, this is more soldiers than the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa combined lost in the First World War. The sad tr

When a conflict is in its twilight hours, its final death throes often manifest as an exponentially rapid alteration in at least one of its combatant’s positions, be they military or diplomatic. In the case of the largest and bloodiest war continental Europe has seen since the Second World War, we can now see clear evidence of the latter - and not from the Ukrainian camp. The culminating peace proposals from a weekend of breakneck cross-Atlantic detente-by-press-communique wi

When searching for local classical shows, I came across a section in a Mozart concert’s description entitled “Your Brain on Art.” The section references studies that argue listening to Mozart enhances “spatial reasoning,” “cognitive performance,” and “ brain wave activity associated with relaxation and mental clarity.” The framing of music as a vehicle for self-betterment, a technology for improvement, speaks to the growing instrumentalization of aesthetics. Art no longer sei

Macron’s France offers a political mirror which Starmer’s Labour ignores at its peril. After years of cautious positioning, Labour has stumbled through the opening phase of government, seemingly unaware of a public exhausted by decline and impatient for visible change. Macron began his project with similar ambitions – technocratic renewal through post-tribal politics – but it has collapsed under a failure to deliver significant structural reform, fracturing the political land