My oldest friend is back in town this week. Yesterday we met for a drink in London Bridge. ‘I have a treat for you’, he said.
The treat turned out to be a bundle of emails I’d sent him in 2000, the year after we left university, when I was living in Seville, trying to write a novel.
I remember that as one of the hardest times of my life.
Read MoreMost social media technology has made us more polarised, despite the best intentions of their liberal employees. The exceptions are online dating apps. Despite the low motives of founders and users, they’ve accidentally led to a marked rise in inter-racial romances.
Read MoreI finally got around to watching Children of Men this week. It’s a 2006 film by Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron, about a near-future where global civilization has collapsed, Britain has become a fortress against waves of mass migration, and human fertility has abruptly stopped. No child has been born for 20 years, the playgrounds are silent, and people’s hearts have hardened.
Read MoreIt was when I took the escalator in Tottenham Court Road station that I realized quite how much Gay Pride has been embraced as a national festival. The entire tube station was festooned in rainbow colours, like a SuperMarioKart racetrack. Outside, a huge sign read Love is Love.
Read MoreI think a lot of emotional problems arise from the fact we're both subjects and objects.
Read MoreRoger Scruton once wrote: ‘The sexual revolution of modern times has disenchanted the sexual act. Sex has been finally removed from the sacred realm: it has become 'my' affair, in which 'we' no longer show an interest. This de-consecration of the reproductive process is the leading fact of modern culture.’
Read MoreOne evening in the winter of 1969, the author Philip Pullman had a transcendent experience on the Charing Cross Road.
Read MoreShould liberal governments try to cultivate certain emotional states in their citizens? In Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, University of Chicago philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum argues that liberal political philosophers, from John Locke to John Rawls, have dangerously ignored ‘the political cultivation of emotion’, failing to explore how governments can encourage pro-social emotions like love, patriotism and tolerance, while curbing anti-social emotions like envy, shame and excessive fear.
Read MoreWe had a good meeting of the London Philosophy Club last night. The guest speaker was Galen Strawson, talking about pan-psychism, which is the theory that all matter is conscious. Pretty mind-blowing (or matter-blowing) stuff.
Read MoreA few weeks ago, I woke up at 3am, for no particular reason, and lay in my bed listening to the city sleeping. My middle-class street in Tufnell Park was placid and at rest. Then I heard a woman sobbing, as she walked down the street.
Read MoreNext week, I’m off to Wales. First, I’m going to Cwmbran, where something is happening called ‘the Welsh Outpouring’. In April, when a young pastor called Richard Taylor was preaching, the congregation felt filled with the Holy Spirit, there were tears, shouts, groans, and this started to happen every evening.
Read MoreThe Catholic church has a new pope! Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio this week became Pope Francis I, the first non-European pope. The first BRIC pope. He sounds like a man of humility and asceticism, who travels on budget airlines - Lord knows that is a trial of the flesh.
Read MoreWe've all hallucinated during sex, haven't we? Or...is it just me?! Well I have anyway, on a couple of occasions. Once was back in 1996. I had just left university, and broken up with my girlfriend in the clumsiest and most insensitive way imaginable.
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