This essay appeared in my regular newsletter, The Pathos of Things, in November 2023. Subscribe here.  In a world of mass media, we are ruled by the tyranny of comparison. We are surrounded by images of beauty and style, of fulfilment and success, that make us feel inadequate by contrast. Sometimes it is even an … Continue reading London: Zombie Capital

This essay appeared in my regular newsletter, The Pathos of Things, in November 2023. Subscribe here.  At some point in the last few years, I gave up on food. I didn’t stop eating food, of course, or even enjoying it, but I stopped aspiring to any kind of skill or refinement in the matter of what enters … Continue reading Food: It’s Complicated

This essay appeared in my regular newsletter, The Pathos of Things, in August 2023. Subscribe here. I have never been on a cruise ship, and probably never will. To be trapped in a crowded tourist resort miles from the nearest land is relatively close to my idea of hell. Yes, with enough alcohol and the … Continue reading The Weird World of Cruise Ships

This essay was published by the New Statesman in May 2023, under the headline “You Should Only Work Four Hours a Day.” Decades ago, Roland Barthes quipped that “one is a writer as Louis XIV was king, even on the toilet”. He was mocking the way literary types like to distinguish themselves from the mass … Continue reading The Lost Art of Leisure