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A Massacre 20 Years On

I have a favourite photograph of Tiananmen Square. It is a horizontal shot. A man rides a bicycle in the foreground – behind him there are serried rows of upright figures – thousands and thousands of figures. The photograph was taken in May 1989. The figures are students celebrating their occupancy of the famous square. […]

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The Danger of Asking the Wrong Questions

We live in an age of experts. From the ‘refrigeration engineer’ who gasses up the air-con, to the garden guy who is now a ‘landscape designer’ skills close to home tend to be specialised. Some may haunt hardware aisles, dreaming of a new drill, but that has more to do with cool tools than getting […]

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New Sexualities

In some ways it is the most basic question of all. Are you are a man or a woman? For centuries, it seemed simple. Men had male sex organs; women had female ones. This did not do a lot for hermaphrodites, who were born with both, but science seemed to solve the impasse by coming […]

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Media Madness

Blaise Pascall, the 17th century French philosopher and mathematician, thought the world’s problems could be solved if we could each learn to sit quietly in a room. But we have never been able or content to do that. We want distraction, and what we call ‘the media’ has provided it. Maybe it always did. Only […]