What is the meaning of The Carpet Crawlers? The Genesis song, whose lyrics were written by Peter Gabriel, has a dense, religious imagery leading to considerable discussion over the years as to what is the meaning of the The Carpet Crawlers lyrics. Here I’ll offer an interpretation that it is, at heart, addressing a terrible […]

A review of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow and an explanation of why the concept of primitive communism is mistaken. The way in which we imagine the first human societies is intimately connected to our current political beliefs. Conservatives believe in repression, the need for […]

‘It’s as if no other poet except Williams had really seen America or heard its language’, wrote Robert Lowell in 1962, near the end of the elder bard’s life: ‘His flowers rustle by the superhighways and pick up all our voices.’ Some decades earlier, Mike Gold, the editor of New Masses magazine, predicted that ‘[w]hen […]

How Monetisation Destroys Good Games Eoghan Ó Nia interviewed by Conor Kostick Conor: We’re going to talk about capitalism and gaming. And I suppose we’re framing the discussion by saying that we live in a strange world where whenever there’s anything that human beings do that’s fun, somebody thinks, ‘oh, I could make some money […]

There are many excellent and inspiring books about the Haitian Revolution, one of the richest and most insightful of which is The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution by Julius S. Scott. The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution by Julius S. Scott In early […]