“Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities” — To give myself a break from practically staring at a screen all day, my pre-bedtime routine lately has been lying on the couch, closing my eyes while submerged in a hodgepodge of blankets, and alternating between the audiobooks of Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower (which he also narrates) and Heather…

Thoughts Inspired by Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act” — I tend to forget that what I write is, in a way, entirely beyond me. Yes, the craft of writing is within my power — how to fit one word after another, how to technically get down the best flowing sentences I can through practice. But, oddly enough, good writing…

How my favourite song of 2022 embodies both a doomed flight and a doomed relationship at the same time — The throughline of Black Country, New Road’s Ants from Up There is the metaphor of flying: it’s in the album’s title, it’s in the album’s artwork, it’s in the many lyrical references that Isaac Wood makes to Concorde, comparing the once tantalizing supersonic aircraft experiment that ended in abject failure…

A meditation on Kanye West’s antisemitic tweet and why it’s not necessarily so easy to separate the art from the artist — About a week ago, with my morning ritual of scouring the internet for something interesting to read while eating breakfast underway, one headline, in particular, grabbed my attention: “Kanye West Locked Out of Twitter Following Antisemitic Tweet.” Huh? My immediate reaction was somewhere in between a kind of dissociative shock…

What the tragedy can and cannot say about the problem of evil — If God is all-powerful, all-good and all-knowledgable, how can there be evil in the world? This simple question — one that has, on its own, inspired a whole branch of theology called theodicy — has remained a constant source of anguish throughout human history. One needs to look no further…

From Baby Keem to Flume to Brockhampton to Madeon, a list compiled by someone who had way too much time on their hands — Covid’s a bitch, I quickly learned as I woke up with an ominously scratchy throat last week. The sore throat, incessant coughing, fever and congestion are one thing; the weighty exhaustion that makes your limbs feel like they’re somewhere between concrete and titanium? The brain fog that leaves you feeling…

An endearing — if not flawed — mixtape that explores the artist’s painful transition into adulthood — “You wish you could be me, don’t you? You wish you could have my creativity, don’t you?,” Mac Miller asks out loud as he’s staring into a camera lens, likely delirious after camping out in the studio for the past months recording his most recent mixtape, Macadelic. He’s obviously joking…

A theme song for overachievers who feel like underachieving loners anyway — Like that moment that you step out of your front door in April and smell the flowery scent of spring for the first time, when a new Tame Impala song comes out, you know it’s going to be a good day. …

The star-studded dark comedy asks how the world would react if it was months away from mass extinction. The final result is partially depressing, partially amusing, but all too real — One morning, as the townspeople were enjoying what they thought was the beginning of a day like any other in their marketplace, a dishevelled man holding a lantern appears out of nowhere. “I seek God! I seek God!,” he begins to scream indiscriminately at both no one and everyone at…