Moving on from making monsters
MONSTER-MAKING IS CONTAGIOUS. Centuries-old narratives about who does or doesn’t belong in a community or a nation and about who is monstrous because they threaten the imagined unity and distinctiveness of the whole have a habit of inspiring new monstrifying narratives. The Nazis explicitly studied, adapted, and expanded to a terrifying degree European formulations of...
from The Dogs
This book came about from an encounter. Every day for over ten years, I passed a dog tethered in a yard on Low Lane near where I lived. He was guarding a pile of scrap metal. His only shelter was a corrugated sheet. He had a bowl of rainwater and his leash allowed him little...
Megan McCubbin: Wild in heart and soul
Megan McCubbin, a familiar face to viewers of the BBC’s Springwatch and Animal Park, is a passionate and eloquent champion of wildlife and one of Britain’s foremost young naturalists. Having grown up in and around the Isle of Wight Zoo, and travelled the world on assignment with step-dad and now fellow Springwatch presenter Chris Packham...
Anita and happiness
Pablo detested Anita because he couldn’t prove what he’d suspected ever since they’d met: that she was an alien. He hated her name because it wasn’t Ana, plain and simple, Ana with real problems like cellulitis, unpaid bills or anxiety brought on by the knowledge that human beings are a mere parenthesis between two unknowns....
