Explore Essays and memoir
Sort by:
Sort by:
Hallelujah! A Brief History of Bombing People
Ben Mauk
Ben Mauk on the West’s longstanding love of missiles, drones, bombs and nukes.
Desire | State of Mind
Andrea Stuart
‘My burgeoning sense of my own attractiveness, so fragile and recently developed, withered in this less than fertile ground.’
Possessed | State of Mind
Jules Montague
‘I am neither fully awake nor entirely asleep. In fact, I wonder if I am even alive.’
Pop-Up People
Peter Pomerantsev
We are living through a period of pop-up populism, where each political movement redefines ‘the Many’ and ‘the People’, where we are always reconsidering who counts as an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’, where what it means to belong is never certain.
Nothing to be afraid of | State of Mind
Anil K. Seth
‘Life in the first person is both magical and terrifying. But it is circumscribed.’ Anil K. Seth on the ties between our brains, bodies and consciousness.
Soon Comes Night
Ekow Eshun
‘I’d become so used to hiding away inside myself I couldn’t respond with any spontaneity. I was stuck in the shallows of my emotions.’
Introduction
Sigrid Rausing
‘What’s in a state of mind? How do we describe emotions, or the complex relationship between individuals and the state?’
Notes on a Suicide
Rana Dasgupta
‘The problem was that, for the most part, it did not matter how widely broadcast your discontent was: no one cared.’
Rana Dasgupta on digital celebrity and a suicide in the banlieues of Paris.
One Picture, A Thousand Words
Charles Glass & Don McCullin
‘I think they are not on the right path. It’s wrong. What they are doing is wrong.’
Out of the Cradle
John Barth
‘What had formerly been a sedative, a tranquilizing soporific, had morphed into a facilitator of reflection, contemplation, deliberation, even inspiration.’
A Mingling | State of Mind
Siri Hustvedt
‘My empathy may become a vehicle of insight for me and therefore help me to help you or it may debilitate me altogether, make me so sad I am no good to you whatsoever.’
