There’s an interesting flaw at the heart of Olivia Wilde’s new movie, Don’t Worry, Darling, which reveals everything wrong with the ongoing culture wars. The premise of the film is simple. A 1950s housewife is living with her husband in…
I first discovered the films of Paolo Sorrentino in university, when I watched his most famous work, The Great Beauty (In Italian, La Grande Bellezza). The film begins in Rome, with the protagonist Jep Gambardella at his birthday party. The…
Martin Heidegger was born in Germany in 1889. He grew up to become one of the most influential philosophers of existentialism: the sphere of philosophy that questions human existence and our responsibilities as free and independent beings in the world.…
With the release of The Wheel of Time on Amazon Prime this month, I thought I’d explore what drew me into the books many years ago, and why I keep going back to them. I grew up reading Robert Jordan’s…
In the middle of lockdown, Russell Bugden posts a video to a local community group on Facebook. The video shows him in his front yard, playing a flugelhorn, similar to a trumpet, to the tune of John Lennon’s Imagine. Images…
This week I had the pleasure of collaborating with Chang Che on a video essay on the Japanese concept of “Omakase,” which literally means “I’ll leave it to you.” But the word means more than that. It evokes a calculated…
A few years ago, I watched the third-highest grossing anime film of all time, Your Name, by Makoto Shinkai. It was an intriguing love story about body swapping between two people who had never met before attempting to find each…
I once attended a philosophy lecture on the value of truth in modern times. It was framed around the rise of Trump, post-truth and ‘alternative facts.’ The story went that people were believing whatever they wanted to believe rather than…
In the 1970s, Davis Cone travelled America and painted the last remaining golden age cinemas. His mission was to paint as many as possible before they were demolished and replaced by new shopping malls and parking lots. Cinemas were the…
Six months ago, I started making video essays for YouTube on philosophy and literature. I thought now would be a good time to look back and reflect on the progress I have made so far, and to look at the…