Charlie Ellis writes: The English lexicon is famously hospitable. Much to the chagrin of prescriptivist sticklers, it is a language that greets new arrivals with open arms. We are accustomed to technological neologisms like ‘doomscrolling’, ‘podcast’, and ‘vibe coding’ and track them with the obsessive energy of a birder spotting a rare migrant.

Katja Bruisch writes: I recently completed a scholarly monograph – an environmental, economic and energy history of peat in imperial and Soviet Russia. After years of thinking and writing, I approached Cambridge University Press. CUP is a leading academic press and their series Studies in Environment and History has a high reputation in my field….

Drew Basile writes: Susan Sontag writes in On Photography that ‘the practice of photography is now identified with the idea that everything in the world could be made interesting through the camera’. If photographs capture life, Sontag warns that they also flatten it. Mundane details transform into nuanced objects of aesthetic contemplation, but the real…

Rosemary Jenkinson writes: April 23rd, 2025: This is my sixth trip to Ukraine and I’ve come to gauge the mood of the people during the US-led peace negotiations. All through the night the bus passes town squares with displays of dead soldiers in darkness. Historical buildings are barely lit, trying not to draw attention to …

Neasa MacErlean writes: It is only a hundred years since most leading British historians regarded Ireland as a country with no history. That was to change within a couple of decades, but those years in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s were unstable ones, and the struggle to demonstrate Ireland’s historical character took place against a…

David Blake Knox writes: The four-part Netflix series Adolescence has generated a public response that has not been seen in the UK since the 1960s broadcast of the gritty BBC drama Cathy Come Home. That TV production portrayed the corrosive effects of homelessness on one family. The current series revolves around a young boy of…

James Moran writes: In November 2008 I was in New York City when Barack Obama was elected. The city felt absolutely electric. I can remember so clearly how, the day after the result, a young man serving sandwiches in a coffee shop dropped absolutely all of the behavioural codes of New York when I ordered…

Frank Freeman writes: I want to say to Trump supporters: ‘I’m sorry, but I won’t vote for a man who mocks handicapped people, who calls dead veterans “suckers and losers”, who says if you’re rich and famous you can sexually assault women and they won’t do anything about it, who sleeps with a porn star…

John Fanning writes: During the last decade there has been widespread coverage of survey results and medical reports dealing with an increase in mental health issues among young people, or Gen Z as the headline writers prefer. Little surprise then that a substantial new book on the subject, The Anxious Generation, by social psychologist and…

Eilís Ward writes: In his essay on ideas of selfhood and egocide in philosophical thought (Dublin Review of Books, Autumn 2024), Joseph Rivera asks why my book Self takes a leap from critique of neoliberal selfhood to Buddhist accounts of the same. A large part of the answer comes from my years teaching politics in…