In free fall, being also a story of and about love
This is a story of the adjective free, and the story is complicated. Let me begin from afar.
Elleke Boehmer’s seminal Colonial and Postcolonial Literature at 30
May 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Elleke Boehmer’s seminal text Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, first published by OUP in 1995 with a second edition following a decade later. It remains a landmark publication in the field of colonial and postcolonial literature and beyond, read, studied, and taught the world over.
Sauntering is hard work
To saunter “to walk in a leisurely way, stroll” is a verb, famous for its etymological opacity. It is instructive and a bit frustrating to read the literature on this word, published between roughly 1874 and 1910, though a few amusing notes in my collection antedate the eighteen-seventies.
50 years after the fall of Saigon [reading list]
On 30 April 1975, the Vietnam War came to a historic end with the fall of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, to North Vietnam forces, marking a significant turning point in world history.
What to do with too many books?
A while ago, my wife and I had some work done on our house, which entailed packing up a half-dozen bookcases until the work was done. We took the opportunity to sift through our books and to decide what we no longer needed. Deciding what to keep and what to let go of was a delicate negotiation. But equally tricky was deciding what to do with books we no longer needed.
Subversion: history’s greatest hits
Subversion—domestic interference to undermine or manipulate a rival—is as old as statecraft itself. But most of what we know about the subject concerns the Cold War and focuses on big powers maliciously manipulating the domestic politics of small ones. To understand how subversion fits into the new epoch of great power rivalry, to know what’s […]
Organizations are our greatest achievement
There are many contenders for the award of humanity’s greatest achievement. Some say its writing. Others say its agriculture. Electricity, space travel, and human rights are also possibilities. I disagree with them all.
The salt of the earth and salt in a saltcellar
First of all, my thanks to those who commented on the previous posts. Don’t miss the note about the ancient Romans’ view of babies on the father’s knee and the suggestion that the idiom to pull one’s leg may be of nautical origin.
Crafting the queer citational turn
It’s a crisp summer morning, and I’ve just made the half hour walk from Sommerville, Massachusetts, to Harvard University. The grounds are majestic, as you’d expect, but everything is fragmented by iron fence railings (gates all locked or staffed by security) and garish white tents that have been installed for graduation festivities. I show my ID and make my way into the Houghton Library reading room where I’ll continue my research on craftwork for a project on queer modernist materialities. As a fan of the show Dickinson, which aired on Apple TV+ for three seasons from 2019-2021, I’ve asked to see the scrapbook set designer Marina Parker made for the archive. I’m fascinated by contemporary adaptations of literary pasts, and Parker’s scrapbook suggests how craft itself might be fundamental to those queer reworkings.
Ten transformative Andraé Crouch tracks that shaped gospel music [playlist]
At his passing in 2015, President Barack Obama celebrated Andraé Crouch as the “leading pioneer of contemporary gospel music.” The Guardian UK newspaper’s obituary called him the “foremost gospel singer of his generation.” Ten years after his death, Andraé Crouch’s songs are still found in more hymnals—Black and white—than any African American composer, save Thomas Dorsey (and Dorsey had a 30-year head start!).
On a limb
One can teach an advanced course on etymology, while climbing up the leg, ant-wise. On foot we reach the territory of Indo-European, but it is not every day that an English word finds itself in such respectable company.
What actually happened during the 1970s?
Working-class politics is back in vogue in the West, but for whom does it speak? An AfD candidate in Germany won over 14% of the vote after claiming the SPD was ‘no longer a workers’ party in the classic sense’ and that his organisation was ‘taking on this role’. The US Vice President, JD Vance, emphasises he is a ‘a working-class boy, born far from the halls of power’ and promises to reshore industrial jobs. Marine Le Pen claims to lead the ‘party of French workers’ and Fratelli d’Italia wins a majority of manual workers after asking if ‘the Left is now no longer in the factories and amongst the workers, where can you find it?’ (its answer: a Pride parade).
How to be a good lawyer in an AI world
There is no shortage of opinions on generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) and its uses in the legal space. If you are a lawyer, it is probably dominating your office meetings and working dinner conversations. Many firms are taking a cautious approach but, with legal technology providers pouring hundreds of millions of pounds into developing ever faster, more accurate tools, it feels only a matter of time before the use of Gen AI is an integral part of most lawyers’ working days.
How did English literature become a university subject?
Even if you didn’t ‘read English’ at university yourself, you almost certainly know plenty of people who did, and more or less everyone has had to study English literature at school at some point or other. As a subject, ‘English’ (an adjective masquerading as a noun) has been central to educational arrangements in Britain for well over a century, seeming for much of that time to occupy a privileged place in the wider culture as well.
A grim shadow of a broad grin
While working on the post about mean and moan, I decided to write something about groan, but I did not realize how far this word would take me.
Ultra-processed foods are making us old beyond our years
In recent years, ultra-processed food (UPFs) consumption has surged globally, raising concerns about its impact on health. Ultra-processed foods are industrial formulations typically containing ingredients not commonly used in home cooking, such as hydrogenated oils, high-fructose corn syrup, flavour enhancers, and emulsifiers.