Book Review:The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough, (2009) Verso.
It isn’t entirely clear why Verso thought now would be a good time to publish a book of extracts from the writings of the Situationists about the urban environment and experience. Editor Tom McDonough, whose excellent introductory essay renders much of the subsequent material [...]

Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates, by John Gerassi, 2009, Yale.
Central to Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism is the concept of Bad Faith, the idea that humans avoid taking responsibility for their actions by pretending they have no choice in how they behave. This can manifest itself in a range of behaviours, such as making [...]

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies, by Andy Beckett. Faber and Faber, 448 pp.
About a quarter of the way into Guardian journalist Andy Beckett’s impressive account of Britain in the 1970s, self-satisfied Labour Party politician Denis Healey, who served as Harold Wilson’s chancellor of the exchequer, observes that he knew “bugger [...]

In the July 4, 2009, edition of the BBC World Service’s discussion program The Forum, Nobel physics laureate Frank Wilczek, author of The Lightness of Being, gave listeners a succinct description of the nature of the universe:
Close to the core of quantum mechanics is that you learn that seeing is a very active process. There [...]

The River Liffey
A menagerie lion running through the middle of Dublin, the Liffey is an arbitrarily imposed U.N.-blue demarcation intended to promulgate false dichotomies among the urban proletariat to imbue them with a consciousness not just false but pantomimic in its theatricality. Have a good look at imperial practices in the construction of nation-states, the [...]

Trinity College: Made famous by the rowdiness and wanton irrational prejudices of its fellows in the 17th century, Trinity College has in more recent years declined into a sad, dilapidated caricature of its former self, like an Ian Paisley with Alzheimer’s. It is now famous for its illuminated manuscripts and for being the location of [...]

Following on from the unalloyed success of the 2006 convention, the member of the Dublin Psychogeographical Society unanimously agreed that no further meetings should take place until all temptation to build on that success had been extinguished in full. The call to hubris thus went unheeded for two entire years, even though demand was such [...]

George Orwell once said something along the lines of just because the news about the Gulags appeared in the Daily Telegraph, it didn’t mean it wasn’t true. The blurb on the front of Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship describes it as “A truly magnificent book.” That quote comes from the Sunday Telegraph.  Conceivably, then, the Telegraph stable [...]

As a teenager watching Clive James on the TV of a Sunday night, I was never quite sure what to make of his combination of sparkling wit and sneering sarcasm. He was undeniably funny and reassuring yet at the same time somehow unable to disguise his discomfort at fronting a show composed of short, superficial [...]