Nobody panic

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A cynic’s guide to unbelief

When I was a little girl, my parents would scold me with scripture. ‘Sita,’ my mother would say, ‘where there is love, nothing is too much trouble and there is always time,’ which was her way of telling me to stop whining. If my brother and I would fight, she would say: ‘So powerful is the light of unity, that it can illuminate the whole Earth,’ as though our altercation over the TV remote was the reason for ethnic tensions in Kosovo. My father was the same, always on about justice and mercy and truth. The Most Great Sin in our house was backbiting and gossip. ‘Thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others,’ he would say, ‘and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbour.’ Needless to say, my breaking news – that Jessie Stevens told me Marjory Klimt was pregnant to Scotty Graft and her parents were making her drop out of school – was not welcome at our dinner table.

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Negotiating cultural heritage

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Resisting the ‘Content Mindset’

Non-fictionWhen we hear publishers, broadcasters or gallerists describing creative work as content, we know immediately that their approach is transactional. When we hear people describe their own work as content, they have already become complicit in their own exploitation. Social media profiles the world over feature bios identifying their owners as ‘content creators’: people who produce interchangeable matter to fill someone else’s space. Social media accounts are available free of charge on the basis that we will keep creating the work that feeds and evolves the algorithm, provides a culturally authentic context for ad placement and keeps us all scrolling – our number-one self-selected addictive behaviour.

Hidden tracks

Non-fictionYoung and Kucyk are as good at tracking down hard-to-find people as they are at tracking down hard-to-find music, although sometimes they do reach dead ends. Their methods aren’t particularly advanced and are often helped by luck. Sometimes they’ll raid the White Pages. Sometimes they’ll search for relatives of musicians online. Sometimes – as in the case of another song on Someone Like Me – they’ll scour through five years’ worth of archived weekly newsletters from a Seventh Day Adventist Church in the UK and Ireland and spot a tiny article that contains the full name of a mysterious musician they’re trying to find.

A philosophical meditation on social media and our kids

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