Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Keeping faith

    Keeping faith

    Frank Herbert’s Dune has been a part of my life for many years—I started reading it for the first time just before I started secondary school. I re-read it several times, along with its sequels up to Chapterhouse Dune, after which I stopped trying to stay abreast of the series. I recall thinking that neither Read more

  • Putting medicine in its place

    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 or edited over 100 books—proper books, mind you, not light novels dashed off in a weekend, but major chunks of work based on original research. He took early retirement in his mid-50s, something most academics Read more

  • The last man who knew everything (about bread)

    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 Wikipedia. If I need to go a bit deeper then I make a big stack of books on the subject and make notes on them. When I’m choosing books to pile up, I try to Read more

  • Between bodies and speakers

    Between bodies and speakers

    Sampling became one of the most significant new techniques in record production during the 1980s, and although its influence on subsequent uses made of samples is debated, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts was probably the first album to make them a central plank. David Byrne and Brian Eno had been collaborating extensively on Read more

  • Nurture writing

    Nurture writing

    I read an interview with Suzanne Simard in New Scientist and it brought tears to my eyes. Her description of the realities revealed in her career as an experimental scientist gave me such a sense of validation and hope that I immediately pre-ordered the book she was plugging, Finding the Mother Tree. In fact, it Read more

  • Hardy perennials

    Hardy perennials

    Kim Stanley Robinson is known for not writing stories about soldiers, or other stereotypically heroic figures—which in our deeply fucked-up cultures are almost always the purveyors of violence. Instead he writes about scientists, administrators, politicians, activists, engineers, labourers, artists, writers, craftspeople, and so on. The kind of characters that seem to interest him the most Read more