I first became a cinephile at a time when going to the movies was impossible.  Like many other people, I kept myself busy during the COVID-19 pandemic by indulging in the best, and worst, movies that streaming services had to offer.  It was my first real involvement with the ‘canon’ of Hollywood productions. I sobbed at The Pursuit of Happyness , cried with laughter at Mean Girls , had my breath taken away by Top Gun,  and couldn’t refuse the offer to watch The Godfather  wit

In his Debt: The First 5000 Years , anthropologist David Graeber provides a series of insights that, when properly understood, challenge the central tenets of conventional economic thought. Most significantly, Graeber’s claim that all money is debt, and by extension a social relation, fundamentally undermines decades of economic orthodoxy which claims that the government must balance its books and, more generally, that ‘one must pay one’s debts’ . Indeed, if all money is debt

To Have or To Be?  turns fifty in a few days. Written by Erich Fromm, a German social psychologist, it analysed the corrosivity of ‘late capitalism’, an epoch most obviously characterised by consumerism. Consumerism comes with constituent attitudes. It encourages us, for instance, to value assets based on their saleability. Entrenched in our consciousness, via the unconscious, Fromm argued that many of these attitudes altered our understanding of ourselves, our contemporaries

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

The buzz surrounding Zohran Mamdani’s  recent victory in the Democratic primaries for NYC Mayor has been understandably inescapable on...

Last month Donald Trump broke his own immigration policy to grant  asylum to 59 white South Africans, allowing them to ‘seek refuge’ in...