Martin Compston is best known for appearing in the entertainingly silly police fantasy Line of Duty, but his first acting…
Keeping faith
Frank Herbert’s Dune has been a part of my life for many years—I started reading it for the first time…
Putting medicine in its place
The historian Roy Porter was known during his lifetime as a ‘one-man book factory’, a prodigiously productive scholar who wrote…
The last man who knew everything (about bread)
Mostly if I want to find out about something (I call it ‘research’ when I’m feeling self-important), I look on…
Between bodies and speakers
Sampling became one of the most significant new techniques in record production during the 1980s, and although its influence on…
Nurture writing
I read an interview with Suzanne Simard in New Scientist and it brought tears to my eyes. Her description of…
Hardy perennials
Kim Stanley Robinson is known for not writing stories about soldiers, or other stereotypically heroic figures—which in our deeply fucked-up…
Ordinary voices
Ordinary voices get so little time and exposure that we tend to forget what they sound like, despite the fact…
Old school concision
Much of the development of videogames passed me by, despite my early and continuing interest, thanks to my long voluntary…
Aesthetic symbols
Having been interested in comics for a very long time, I have of course been aware of manga. Until now,…
Not quite
Martin Scorsese has something of a reputation as a film maker who does movies about criminals in New York, but…
Central admixture
Having recently read and written about Quicksilver, the book which precedes The Confusion in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy, there’s…
Vivid conviction
Martin Scorsese enjoys making films about criminals. He likes representing their lives and their culture, and he often collaborates with…
Rhyming cinema
One thing I’ve had reinforced through watching the Rudolph Maté directed Robert Mitchum vehicle Second Chance (1953), is the total…
Oliver Arditi 