criticism

Reviewing Dava Sobel’s The Glass Universe for the Sunday Times.

Comparisons of Stefánie Faludi’s two reinventions – first as an all-American father and then as a repatriated Hungarian grande dame – could have been crass. Yet the points are never laboured. “Which has been easier for you,” Faludi asks her father, “to be accepted as a woman after being born a man, or to be accepted as a Magyar after being born a Jew?” Her father picks “woman”, explaining that this is what is now on her birth certificate. Later, Faludi finds the old official family documents, all of which mention one fact about the Friedmans: Jew. Some identities can be escaped, or...

Kat Banyard’s Pimp State makes it clear our laws on prostitution are not working – so how should we change them?

Re-reading John Milton’s Areopagitica for BBC Radio 3′s The Essay series. 

From wars to power ballads: the geopolitics of Eurovision. 

“Can women have it aaaaaaaaaargh…”- on Anne Marie Slaughter’s Unfinished Business. 

But I am getting ahead of myself. What is a “hot feminist”, I hear you whimper from beneath a fortress made of unread copies of Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex? I’ll let Polly explain:“Hot like: hot yoga, and hot topic, and also ‘hot’ as in ‘sexy hot’, obviously,” I told my favourite, longest term editor, N. “Hot as in ‘potato’ and ‘dangerous’ and ‘relevant’ and ‘ouch’. Hot Feminist!”The “hot feminist” is not afraid to worry at endless, tedious length about her appearance and she is definitely not at all defensive about being a “shavey leggy, fashion-fixated, wrinkle-averse,...

“Public shaming is a symptom of institutional failure. It flourishes when people feel there is no accountability or possibility of redress through other channels. As our legal system matured and the concept of due process developed, we were content to outsource punishment to the state. Now, with trust in our institutions failing, we want to take matters into our own hands again.” - a review of Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and Jennifer Jacquet’s Is Shame...

What the Leonardo and the loo paper can tell us about modern politics.- a column about “framing” of things, and ideas, and why that...