A cynic’s guide to unbelief

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Instructions for killing monsters

I do know this: Never in the history of the world has any monster been defeated with fear. (Literally, never. I checked.) Ultimately, the only shields against the powers of destruction, death and evil are the qualities that come under the banner of love, which is the bright day to fear’s night.

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Baba

Poetry A friend suggests a psychologist, but my grandmother was a house witch, her mother the thirteenth child of the thirteenth child. Knock twice on the cards...

Adventures in the apocalyptic style

Non-fictionIt's easy to laugh at preppers, dismissing their ideas in the process. It’s also easy to adopt the prepper worldview wholesale, and make fun of everyone else – all those sheeple – for not seeing what a mess we’re really in. It’s harder, but ultimately more productive, to see prepping as a complex, contradictory response to the multiple crises the world is facing. Prepping is more than just a freakshow, although it is that. And prepping is more than a useful instructional manual, although it is that, too. Neither wholly reasonable nor wholly ridiculous, prepping culture is a vivid and alarming reflection of a contemporary Anglophone culture that exists in a state of perma-crisis and can find only simple answers to wicked problems.

Palio De Siena

Poetry In the Tuscan city of Siena for seven hundred years this annual race has run to settle rivalries between citizens of its seventeen contradas,municipal divides of this medieval city...