Or, how we got here and where we go next — I remember not too long ago when Republicans used to bemoan that even when they held political power, it was the Democrats who had won the culture war. If that was ever true, it certainly isn’t now. The generation growing up in the 2010s never exactly felt optimistic about their…

The court of public opinion, the dangers of stan culture and the refusal to believe women over famous men — If you’ve spent any time on the internet over the last few weeks, you’ve almost certainly seen content — much of it combative, and clickbait-y in nature — regarding the defamation trial of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. For those somehow lucky enough to have avoided the case, and the…

…And what next as we reckon with the fallout? — The phrase “the most important election of our lifetime” is thrown out reliably every four years by candidates on both sides of the aisle trying to turn out as many of their supporters as possible. The ubiquity of the phrase makes it harder to recognise when the stakes really are…

What the Goldberg saga tells us about the state of modern-day discourse — “The Holocaust isn’t about race”. Those are the five words that landed Whoopi Goldberg in, perhaps, the biggest controversy of her career thus far. The Holocaust was, Goldberg argued, “about man’s inhumanity to man”. Indeed, it was about man’s inhumanity towards to man, but crucially it was also very much…

Continued COVID school closures fly in the face of science and risk disaster for children’s development and mental well-being — It’s easy to forget just how little we knew at the start of the pandemic. In January 2020, the World Health Organisation declared that there was “no clear evidence” of human-to-human Coronavirus transmission. In March of that same year, the US Surgeon General warned that masks didn’t just fail to…

Our trust in institutions — and each other — is rapidly fading — When the Omicron variant began to spread rapidly across Europe and North America in December 2020, most Western countries were protected from the doomsday scenario some had predicted thanks to mass vaccine immunity. However, not everywhere was as fortunate. In both the UK and the US, cases surged to record…

The best, and most under-rated, music of 2021 — 2020 was a year of isolation and lockdown. As such, while many big-name musicians sat out the year due to the unique constraints they faced, smaller, and less commercial artists — used to working with limited resources — welled the mine of 2020’s hardship to create the year’s defining soundtrack…

(And when they’re not) — Earlier this month, the New York Times put out a 14 minute video entitled “Blue States, You’re The Problem”; exploring the failings of Democrats to make sufficient progressive strides even in states where they have a monopoly on power. The video’s title alone was enough to send the Times’ predominantly…

Or, How Republicans used race-baiting to win, and how Democrats can stop it happening again — Post-financial crisis, the Republican Party’s brand of hardline fiscal conservatism; of rolling back workers rights, refusing to raise the minimum wage and repealing key protections within the Affordable Care Act, has been met with an increasingly frosty reception from the American public. In place of embracing a more transformative economic…