The Distance Between Words There are places we inherit without ever quite possessing them, and languages we love before we know how to speak them. In Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue and R.F. Kuang’s Taipei Story, Taiwan becomes the setting for…
On The Art Of Starting Small On 7 October, food writer and broadcaster Rachel Khoo arrives at Electric House in London as part of a tour for her first memoir, The Smallest Restaurant in Paris. The title refers not to…
The Visible Woman and The Dalinian Triangle In the small village of Púbol, in the Baix Empordà hinterland of Catalonia, Salvador Dalí’s presence is initially less obvious than it is in Figueres or Portlligat. There is no theatrical museum façade…
A Labyrinth Of Memory, Wonder and Captivity There are novels that construct imaginary worlds, and novels that make the ordinary world feel temporarily imaginary. Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi manages both. Published in 2020, sixteen years after Clarke’s debut, the novel begins…
Exploring the latest research on what altered-states reveal about reality There are few questions more likely to make neuroscience suddenly resemble philosophy than this one: what should we make of a person who takes a psychedelic drug, enters what appears…
On a wooded Surrey hillside, a small mortuary chapel turns local clay, medieval ornament, Art Nouveau and a Victorian fascination with world religions into something almost hallucinatory. Its creator, Mary Seton Watts, has spent too long in the shadow of…
Long before “immersive art” became a cultural industry, the Argentine-born radical was using lights, mirrors and games to prise spectators from passivity. Tate Modern’s luminous retrospective reveals both the promise and the paradox of participation. Very little stays obediently…
The Right To Doubt: Ai Weiwei Unfastens History Transforming the Aviva Studios Warehouse into the black box of history: a monstrous chandelier of bones hangs overhead, as an encyclopaedia of bombs covers the back wall, and a boat nearly…
The mirror talks back: building a vocabulary for a trillion new minds Antikythera’s new research programme imagines artificial intelligence not as a helpful assistant, but as a vast population inhabiting its own social and institutional ecology. The prospect is…
